






* 









I 

























































( Frontispiece . See jjage 40 .^ 


THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER. 






The End of the World 




A LOVE STORY, 


BY 

EDWARD EGGLESTON, 

AUTHOR OF “THE HOOSIEB SCHOOL-MASTER," KTOU 


WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS. 



NEW YORK: 

ORANGE JUDD COMPANY, 

1908 


Entered, according to Act of Congress, In the year 1872, by 

ORANGE JUDD & CO., 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, 


Copyright, 1900 
By EDWARD EGGLESTON 

Received from 
Copyright Office. 

DEC 23 1 909 



r 


PREFACE. 


[in the potential mood.] 

It is the pretty unanimous conclusion of book-writers that 
prefaces are most unnecessary and useless prependages, since no* 
body reads them. And it is the pretty unanimous practice of 
book-writers to continue to write them with such pains and 
elaborateness as would indicate a belief that the success 
of a book depends upon the favorable prejudice begotten of 
a graceful preface. My principal embarrassment is that it is 
not customary for a book to have more than one. How 
then shall I choose between the half-dozen letters of in- 
troduction I might give my story, each better and worse on 
many accounts than either of the others ? I am rather 
inclined to adopt the following, which might for some rea- 
sons be styled the 

PREFACE SENTIMENTAL, 

Perhaps no writer not infatuated with conceit, can send out a 
book full of thought and feeling which, whatever they may be 
worth, are his own, without a parental anxiety in regard to the fate 
of his offspring. And there are few prefaces which do not in some 
way betray this nervousness. I confess to a respect for even the 
prefatory doggerel of good Tinker Bunyan — a respect for his paternal 
tenderness toward his book, not at all for his villainous rhyming. 
When I saw, the other day, the white handkerchiefs of my children 
waving an adieu as they sailed away from me, a profound anxiety 
seized me. So now, as I part company with August and Julia, with 
my beloved Jonas and my much-respected Cynthy Ann, with the 
mud-clerk on the Iatan, and the shaggy lord of Shady-Hollow Castle, 
and the rest, that have watched with me of nights and crossed the 


5 


6 


PREFACE. 


ferry with me twice a day for half a year — even now, as I see them 
waving me adieu with their red silk and “yaller” cotton “hand- 
kerchers,” I know how many rocks of misunderstanding and crit- 
icism and how many shoals of damning faint praise are before them, 
and my heart is full of misgiving. 

But it will never do to have misgivings in a preface. How 

often have publishers told me this ! Ah ! if I could write with 
half the heart and hope my publishers evince in their adver- 
tisements, where they talk about “ front rank ” and “ great Amer- 
ican story” and all that, it would doubtless be better for the 
book, provided anybody would read the preface or believe it 
when they had read it. But at any rate let us not have a 
preface in the minor key. 

A philosophical friend of mine, who is addicted to Carlyle, 
has recommended that I try the following, which he calls 

THE HIGH PHILOSOPHICAL PREFACE. 

Why should I try to forestall the Verdict? Is it not foreordained 
in the very nature of a Book and the Constitution of the Reader 
that a certain very Definite Number of Readers will misunderstand 
and dislike a given Book ? And that another very Definite Number 
will understand it and dislike it none the less? And that still a 
third class, also definitely fixed in the Eternal Nature of Things, will 
misunderstand and like it, and, what is more, like it only because 
of their misunderstanding? And in relation to a true Book, there 
can not fail to be an Elect Few who understand admiringly and 
understandingly admire. Why, then, make bows, write prefaces, 
attempt to prejudice the Case? Can I change the Reader? Will I 
change the Book ? No ? Then away with Preface ! The destiny of 
the Book is fixed. I can not foretell it, for I am no prophet. But let 
us not hope to change the Fates by our prefatory bowing and scraping. 

1 was forced to confess to my friend who was so kind as to 

offer to lend me this preface, that there was much truth in it 
and that truth is nowhere more rare than in prefaces, but 
it was not possible to adopt it, for two reasons: one, that 


PREFACE. 


f 


my proof-reader can not abide so many capitals, maintaining 
that they disfigure the page, and what is a preface of the 
high philosophical sort worth without a profusion of capitals ? 
Even Carlyle’s columns would lose their greatest ornament if 
their capitals were gone. The second reason for declining to 
use this preface was that my publishers are not philosophers 
and would never be content with an “ Elect Few,” and for 
my own part the pecuniary interest I have in the copyright 
renders it quite desirable that as many as possible should be 
elected to like it, or at least to buy it. 

After all it seems a pity that I can not bring myself to use a 
straightforward 

APOLOGETIC AND EXPLANATORY PREFACE. 

In view of the favor bestowed upon the author’s previous story, both 
by the Public who Criticise and the Public who Buy, it seems a little 
ungracious to present so soon, another, the scene of which is also 
laid in the valley of the Ohio. But the picture of Western country 
life in “ The Hoosier School-Master would not have been complete 
without this companion-piece, which presents a different phase of it. 
And indeed there is no provincial life richer in material if only one 
knew how to get at it. 

Nothing is more reverent than a wholesome hatred of hypocri- 
sy. If any man think I have offended against his religion, I must 
believe that his religion is not what it should be. If anybody 
shall imagine that this is a work of religious controversy leveled 
at the Adventists, he will have wholly mistaken my meaning. Lit- 
eralism and fanaticism are not vices confined to any one sect. They 
are, unfortunately, pretty widely distributed. However, if 

And so on. 

But why multiply examples of the half-dozen or more that 
I might, could, would, or should have written ? Since every- 
body is agreed that nobody reads a preface, I have concluded 
to let the book go without any. 

Brooklyn, September, 1872. 


“And as he [ Wordsworth] mingled freely with all kinds of men, he found 
o pith of sense and a solidity of judgment here and there among the unlearned 
which he had failed to find in the most lettered; from obscure men he 

heard high truths And love , true love and pure , he 

found was no flower reared only in what was called refined society , and 

requiring leisure and polished manners for its growth 

Me believed that in country people, what is permanent in human nature, 
the essential feelings and passions of mankind , exist in greater simplicity 
and strength”— Principal Shaikp. 


A. DEDICATION. 

It would hardly be in character for me to dedicate this book 
in good, stiff, old-fashioned tomb-stone style, but I could not have 
put in the background of scenery without being reminded of the 
two boys, inseparable as the Siamese twins, who gathered mussel- 
shells in the river marge, played hide-and-seek in the hollow syca- 
mores, and led a happy life in the shadow of just such hills as those 
among which the events of this story took place. And all the more 
that the generous boy who was my playmate then is the generous 
man who has relieved me of many burdens while I wrote this story, 
do I feel impelled to dedicate it to Geobge Caby Eggleston, a 
manly man and a brotherly brother. 


CONTENTS, 


Chapter I. — In Love with a Dutchman . 11 

Chapter II. — An Explosion t 22 

Chapter III. — A Farewell 26 

Chapter IV.— A Counter-Irritant ’ *\ 35 

Chapter V.— At the Castle 39 

Chapter YI.— The Backwoods Philosopher 47 

Chapter VII.— Within and Without 54 

Chapter VIII. — Figgers won’t Lie 57 

Chapter IX.— The New Singing-Master 62 

Chapter X.— An Offer of Help 71 

Chapter XI. — The Coon- dog Argument 75 

Chapter XII.— Two Mistakes ; 79 

Chapter XIII.— The Spider Spins 89 

Chapter XIV.— The Spider’s Web 94 

Chapter XV. — The Web Broken 101 

Chapter XVI.— Jonas Expounds the Subject 109 

Chapter XVII.— The Wrong Pew ] 115 

Chapter XVIII.— The Encounter ,..123 

Chapter XIX.— The Mother 129 

Chapter XX.— The Steam-Doctor 133 

Chapter XXI.— The Hawk in a New Part 145 

Chapter XXII —Jonas Expresses his Opinion on Dutchmen 149 

Chapter XXIII. — Somethin’ Ludikerous 154 

Chapter XXIV.— The Giant Great-heart 162 

Chapter XXV.— A Chapter of Betweens 167 

Chapter XXVI.— A Nice Little Game 171 

Chapter XXVn. — The Result of an Evening with Gentlemen 181 

CnAPTER XXVIII.— Waking up an Ugly Customer 187 

Chapter XXIX.— August and Norman 193 

Chapter XXX. — Aground 197 

Chapter XXXI. — Cynthy Ann’s Sacrifice 200 

Chapter XXXII.— Julia’s Enterprise 207 

Chapter XXXHI.— The Secret Stairway 212 

Chapter XXXIV. — The Interview 215 

Chapter XXXV.— Getting Ready for the End 220 

Chapter XXXVI.— The Sin of Sanctimony 225 

Chapter XXXVTI. — The Deluge 232 

Chapter XXXVIII.— Scaring a Hawk 23C 

Chapter XXXIX.— Jonas takes an Appeal 243 

C hap ter XL.— Selling out 251 


9 


10 


CONTENTS, 


Chapter XLI. — The Last Day and What Happened in it.., 256 

Chapter XLII.— For Ever and Ever 264 

Chapter XLIII.— The Midnight Alarm 271 

Chapter XLI V.— Squaring Accounts 278 

Chapter XLV.— New Plans 288 

Chapter XL VI. —The Shiveree 293 


ILLUSTRATIONS. 

By FRANK BEARD. 


The Backwoods Philosopher Frontispiece. 

Taking an Observation 14 

A Talk with a Plowman 17 

A little rustle brought her to consciousness 31 

Gottlieb 36 

The Castle 41 

The Sedilium at the Castle 45 

“Look at me” 49 

“ Don’t be oncharitable, Jonas ” 64 

The Hawk 67 

“ TeU that to Jule ” 85 

Tempted 91 

“ Now I hate you ” 97 

AtCynthy’s Door 102 

Cynthy Ann had often said in class-meeting that temptations abounded on 

every hand 105 

Jonas 112 

Julia sat down in mortification 121 

“ Good-by 1 ” 126 

The Mother’s Blessing 131 

Corn-Sweats and Calamus 134 

“ Fire ! Murder ! Help ! ” 137 

Norman Anderson 151 

Somethin’ Ludikerous 157 

To the Rescue 163 

A Nice Little Game 17$ 

The Mud -Clerk 183 

Waking up an Ugly Customer 191 

Cynthy Ann’s Sacrifice 204 

A Pastoral Visit 227 

Brother Goshorn 246 

“ Say them words over again ” 248 

“ I want to buy your place ” 253 


THE END OF THE WORLD 


CHAPTER I. 


IN LOVE WITH A DUTCHMAN. 



DON’T believe that you’d care a cent if she 
did marry a Dutchman ! She might as well as to 
marry some white folks I know.” 

Samuel Anderson made no reply. It would 
be of no use to reply. Shrews are tamed only by 
silence. Anderson had long since learned that the little shred 
of influence which remained to him in his own house would 
disappear whenever his teeth were no longer able to shut his 
tongue securely in. So now, when his wife poured out this 
hot lava of argumentum ad 7wminem, he closed the teeth down 
in a dead-lock way over the tongue, and compressed the lips 
tightly over the teeth, and shut his finger-nails into his work- 
hardened palms. And then, distrusting all these precautions, 
fearing lest he should be unable to hold on to his temper even 
11 




12 


THE END OP THE WOBLD. 


“with this grip, the little man strode out of the house with his 
wife’s shrill voice in his ears. 

Mrs. Anderson had good reason to fear that her daughter 
was in love with a “ Dutchman,” as she phrased it in her con- 
tempt. The few Germans who had penetrated to the West at 
that time were looked upon with hardly more favor than the 
Californians feel for the almond-eyed Chinaman. They were 
foreigners, who would talk gibberish instead of the plain Eng- 
lish which everybody could understand, and they were not yet 
civilized enough to like the yellow saleratus-biscuit and the 
“salt-rising” bread of which their neighbors were so fond. 
Reason enough to hate them ! 

Only half an hour before this outburst of Mrs. Anderson’s, 
she had set a trap for her daughter Julia, and had fairly 
caught her. 

“Jule! Jule ! O Jul-y-e-eei” she had called. 

And Julia, who was down in the garden hoeing a bed in 
which she meant to plant some “Johnny -jump -ups,” came 
quickly toward the house, though she knew it would be of nc 
use to come quickly. Let her come quickly, or let her come 
slowly, the rebuke was sure to greet her all the same. 

“ Why don’t you come when you’re called, I'd like to know ! 
You’re never in reach when you’re wanted, and you’re good 
for nothing when you are here!” 

Julia Anderson’s earliest lesson from her mother’s lips had 
been that she was good for nothing. And every day and almost 
every hour since had brought her repeated assurances that she 
was good for nothing. If she had not been good for a great 
deal, she would long since have been good for nothing as the 
result of such teaching. But though this was not the first, nor 


IN LOVE WITH A DUTCHMAN. 


13 


the thousandth, nor the ten thousandth time that she had been 
told that she was good for nothing, the accustomed insult 
seemed to sting her now more than ever. Was it that, being 
almost eighteen, she was beginning to feel the woman blos- 
soming in her nature? Or, was it that the tender words of 
August Wehle had made her sure that she was good for some- 
thing, that now her heart felt her mother’s insult to be a stale, 
selfish, ill-natured lie ? 

u Take this cup of tea over to Mrs. Malcolm’s, and tell her 
tnat it a’n’t quite as good as what I horded of her last week. 
And tell her that they’ll be a new-fangled preacher at the 
school-house a Sunday, a Millerite or somethin’, a preachin’ 
about the end of the world.” 

Julia did not say “Yes, ma’am,” in her usually meek style. 
She smarted a little yet from the harsh words, and so went 
away in silence. 

Why did she walk fast ? Had she noticed that August 
Wehle, who was “breaking up” her father’s north field, wjis 
just plowing down the ■'.rest side of his land ? If she hast- 
ened, she might reach the cross-fence as he came round to 
it, and while he was yet hidden from the sight of the house 
by the turn of the hill. And would not a few words fro;.. 
August Wehle be pleasant to her ears after her mother’s shar- 
depreciation ? It is at least safe to conjecture that some sue/, 
feeling made her hurry through the long, waving timothy of the 
meadow, and made her cross the log that spanned the brook 
without ever so much as stopping to look at the minnows 
glancing about in the water flecked with the sunlight that 
struggled through the boughs of the water-willows. For, in 
her thorough loneliness, Julia Anderson had come to love the 


14 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


birds, the squirrels, and the fishes as companions, and in all her 
life she had never before crossed the meadow brook without 
stooping to look at the minnows. 

All this haste Mrs. Anderson noticed. Having often scolded 



TAKING AN OBSERVATION. 

Julia for “talking to the fishes like a fool,” she noticed the 
omission. And now she only waited until Julia was over the 
hill to take the path round the fence under shelter of the black- 
berry thicket, until she came to the clump of elders, from the 




IN LOV* WITH A DUTCHMAN. 


15 


midst of which she could plainly see if any conversation should 
take place between her Julia and the comely young Dutchman. 

In fact, Julia need not have hurried so much. For August 
Wehle had kept one eye on his horses and the other on the 
house all that day. It was the quick look of intelligence be- 
tween the two at dinner that had aroused the mother’s suspi- 
cions. And Wehle had noticed the work on the garden-bed, the 
call to the house, and the starting of Julia on the path toward 
Mrs. Malcolm’s. His face had grown hot, and his hand had 
trembled. For once he had failed to see the stone in his way, 
until the plow was thrown clean from the furrow. And when 
he came to the shade of the butternut-tree by which she must 
pass, it had seemed to him imperative that the horses should 
rest. Besides, the hames-string wanted tightening on the bay, 
and old Dick’s throat-latch must need a little fixing. He was 
not sure that the clevis-pin had not been loosened by the col- 
lision with the stone just now. And so, upon one pretext and 
another, he managed to delay starting his plow until Julia came 
by, and then, though his heart had counted all her steps from 
the door-stone to the tree, then he looked up surprised. Noth- 
ing could be so astonishing to him as to see her there ! For love 
is needlessly crafty, it has always an instinct of concealment, cf 
indirection about it. The boy, and especially the girl, who 
will tell the truth frankly in regard to a love affair is a miracle 
of veracity. But there are such, and they are to be reverenced 
— with the reverence paid to martyrs. 

On her part, Julia Anderson had walked on as though she, 
meant to pass the young plowman by, until he spoke, and then 
she started, and blushed, and stopped, and nervously broke off 
|he top of a last year’s iron- weed and began to break it into 


16 


THE END OF THE WORLD* 


bits while he talked, looking down most of the time, but lifting 
her eyes to his now and then. And to the sun-browned but 
delicate-faced young German it seemed a vision of Paradise — 
every glimpse of that fresh girl’s face in the deep shade of the 
sun-bonnet. For girls’ faces can never look so sweet in this 
generation as they did to the boys who caught sight of them, 
hidden away, precious things, in the obscurity of a tunnel of 
pasteboard and calico! 

This was not their first love-talk. Were they engaged ? 
Yes, and no. By all the speech their eyes were capable of in 
school, and of late by words, they were engaged in loving one 
another, and in telling one another of it. But they were young, 
and separated by circumstances, and they had hardly begun to 
think of marriage yet. It was enough for the present to love and 
be loved. The most delightful stage of a love affair is that in 
which the present is sufficient and there is no past or future. 
And so August hung his elbow around the top of the bay horse’s 
hames, and talked to Julia. 

It is the highest praise of the German heart that it loves 
flowers and little children ; and like a German and like a lover 
that he was, August began to speak of the anemones and the 
violets that were already blooming in the corners of the fence. 
Girls in love are not apt to say anything very fresh. And Julia 
only said she thought the flowers seemed happy in the sun- 
light. In answer to this speech, which seemed to the lover a bit 
of inspiration, he quoted from Schiller the lines: 

“Yet weep, soft children of the Spring; 

The feelings Love alone can bring 
Have been denied to you!” 

With the quick and crafty modesty of her sex, Julia evaded 


A TALK WITH A PLOWMAN 






IN’ LOVE WITH A DUTCHMAN. 


19 


this very pleasant shaft by saying: “How much you know, 
August ! How do you learn it ? ” 

And August was pleased, partly because of the compliment, 
but chiefly because in saying it Julia had brought the sun-bon- 
net in such a range that he could see the bright eyes and blushing 
face at the bottom of this camera-oscura. He did not hasten to 
reply. While the vision lasted he enjoyed the vision. Not until 
the sun-bonnet dropped did he take up the answer to her question. 

“ I don’t know much, but what I do know I have learned out 
of your Uncle Andrew’s books.” 

“ Do you know my Uncle Andrew ? What a strange man he 
is ! He never comes here, and we never go there, and my mother 
never speaks to him, and my father doesn’t often have anything 
to say to him. And so you have been at his house. They say 
he has all up-stairs full of books, and ever so many cats and 
dogs and birds and squirrels about. But I thought he never let 
anybody go up-stairs.” 

“ He lets me,” said August, when she had ended her speech 
and dropped her sun-bonnet again out of the range of his 
eyes, which, in truth, were too steadfast in their gaze. “I spend 
many evenings up-stairs.” August had just a trace of German 
in his idiom. 

“What makes Uncle Andrew so curious, I wonder?” 

“I don’t exactly know. Some say he was treated not just 
right by a woman when he was a young man. I don’t know. 
He seems happy. I don’t wonder a man should be curious 
though when a woman that he loves treats him not just right. 
Any way, if he loves her with all his heart, as I love Jule 
Anderson ! ” 

These last words came with an effort. And Julia just then 


20 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


remembered her errand, and said, 41 1 must hurry,” and, with a 
country girl’s agility, she climbed over the fence before August 
could help her, and gave him another look through her bon- 
net-telescope from the other side, and then hastened on to return 
the tea, and to tell Mrs. Malcolm that there was to be a Millerite 
preacher at the school-house on Sunday night. And August 
found that his horses were quite cool, while he was quite hot. 
He cleaned his mold-board, and swung his plow round, and 
then, with a “ Whoa ! haw ! ” and a pull upon the single line 
which Western plowmen use to guide their horses, he drew the 
team into their place, and set himself to watching the turning 
of the rich, fragrant black earth. And even as he set his plow- 
share, so he set his purpose to overcome all obstacles, and to marry 
Julia Anderson. With the same steady, irresistible, onward 
course would he overcome all that lay between him and the 
soul that shone out of the face that dwelt in the bottom of the 
sun-bonnet. 

From her covert in the elder-bushes Mrs. Anderson had seen 
the parley, and her cheeks had also grown hot, but from a verjl 
different emotion. She had not heard the words. She had seen 
the loitering girl and the loitering plowboy, and she went back 
to the house vowing that she’d “teach Jule Anderson how to 
spend her time talking to a Dutchman.” And yet the more she 
thought of it, the more she was satisfied that it wasn’t best to 
“make a fuss ’’just yet. She might hasten what she wanted to 
prevent. For though Julia was obedient and mild in word, she 
was none the less a little stubborn, and in a matter of this sort 
might take the bit in her teeth. 

And so Mrs. Anderson had recourse, as usual, to her hus* 
band. She knew she could browbeat him. She demanded that 


IN LOVE WITH A DUTCHMAN. 


21 


August Welilc should be paid off and discharged. And when 
Anderson had hesitated, because he feared he could not get 
another so good a hand, and for other reasons, she burst out 
into the declaration: 

“I don’t believe thft you’d care a cent if she did marry a 
Dutchman i She might as well as to marry some white folks I 
know.” 


22 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER II. 

AN EXPLOSION. 


1 

( was settled that August was to be quietly 

discharged at the end of his month, which was 
Saturday night. Neither he nor Julia must suspect 
any opposition to their attachment, nor any discovery 
of it, indeed. This was settled by Mrs. Anderson. 
She usually settled things. First, she settled upon the course 
to be pursued. Then she settled her husband. He always made 
a show of resistance. His dignity required a show of resistance. 
But it was only a show. He always meant to surrender in the 
end. Whenever his wife ceased her fire of small-anns and her- 
self hung out the flag of truce, he instantly capitulated. As in 
every other dispute, so in this one about the discharge of the 
“ miserable, 'mpudent Dutchman,” Mrs. Anderson attacked her 
husband at, all his weak points, and she had learned by heart a 
catalogue of his weak points. Then, when he was sufficiently 
galled to be entirely miserable ; when she had expressed her 
regret that she hadn’t married somebody with some heart, 
and that she had ever left her father’s house, for her father was 
always good to her; and when she had sufficiently reminded 
him of the lover she had given up for him, and of how much 
he had loved her, and how miserable she had made him by 
loving Samuel Anderson — when she had conducted the quarrel 



AN EXPLOSION. 


23 


through all the preliminary stages, she always carried her point 
in the end by a coup de pa/rtie somewhat in this fashion : 

“That’s just the way! Always the way with you men! 
I suppose I must give up to you as usual. You’ve lorded it 
over me from the start. I can’t even have the management of 
my own daughter. But I do think that after I’ve let you have 
your way in so many things, you might turn off that fellow. 
You might let me have my way in one little thing, and you would 
if you cared for me. You know how liable I am to die at any 
moment of heart-disease, and yet you will prolong this excite- 
ment in this way.” 

Now, there is nothing a weak man likes so much as to be 
considered strong, nothing a henpecked man likes so much 
as to be regarded a tyrant. If you ever hear a man boast of 
his determination to rule his own house, you may feel sure 
that he is subdued. And a henpecked husband always makes 
a great show of opposing everything that looks toward the en- 
largement of the work or privileges of women. Such a man 
insists on the shadow of authority because he can not have 
the substance. It is a great satisfaction to him that, his wife 
can never be president, and that she can not make speeches 
in prayer-meeting. While he retains these badges of superiority, 
he is still in some sense head of the family. 

So when Mrs. Anderson loyally reminded her husband that 
she had always let him have his own way, he believed her 
because he wanted to, though he could not just at the moment 
recall the particular instances. And knowing that he must yield, 
he rather liked to yield as an act of sovereign grace to the poor 
^preieed wife who begged it. 

ell, if you insist on it, ot course, I will not refuse you,” 


24 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


he said ; “ and perhaps you are right.” He had yielded in this 
way almost every day of his married life, and in this way he 
yielded to the demand that August should be discharged. But 
he agreed with his wife that Julia should not know anything 
about it, and that there must be no leave-taking allowed. 

The very next day Julia sat sewing on the long porch in 
front of the house. Cynthy Ann was getting dinner in the 
kitchen at the other end of the hall, and Mrs. Anderson was 
busy in her usual battle with dirt. She kept the house clean, 
because it gratified her combativeness and her domineering dis- 
position to have the house clean in spite of the ever-encroach- 
ing dirt. And so she scrubbed and scolded, and scolded and 
scrubbed, the scrubbing and scolding agreeing in time and 
rhythm. The scolding was the vocal music, the scrubbing an 
accompaniment. The concordant discord was perfect. Just at 
the moment I speak of there was a lull in her scolding. The 
symphonious scrubbing went on as usual. Julia, wishing to 
divert the next thunder-storm from herself, erected what she 
imagined might prove a conversational lightning-rod, by asking 
a question on a topic foreign to the theme of the last march 
her mother had played and sung so sweetly with brush and 
voice. 

“ Mother, what makes Uncle Andrew so queer ? ” 

“I don’t know. He was always queer.” This was spoken 
in a staccato, snapping-turtle way. But when one has lived 
all one’s life with a snapping-turtle, one doesn’t mind. Julia did 
not mind. She was curious to know what was the matter with 
her uncle, Andrew Anderson. So she said: 

“I’ve heard that some false woman treated him cruelly; is 
that so?” 


AN EXPLOSION. 


25 


Julia did not see how red her mother’s face was, for she 
was not regarding her. 

“Who told you that?” Julia was so used to hearing her 
mother speak in an excited way that she hardly noticed the 
strange tremor in this question. 

“ August.” 

The symphony ceased in a moment. The scrubbing-brush 
dropped in the pail of soapsuds. But the vocal storm burst 
forth with a violence that startled even Julia. “August said 
that, did he ? And you listened, did you ? You listened to 
that ? Ton listened to that ? You listened to that f Hey ? He 
slandered your mother. You listened to him slander your 
mother ! ” By this time Mrs. Anderson was at white heat. Julia 
was speechless. “ I saw you yesterday flirting with that Dutch- 
man, and listening to his abuse of your mother ! And now you 
insult me ! Well, to-morrow will be the last day that that 
Dutchman will hold a plow on this place. And you’d better 
look out for yourself, miss! You ” 

Here followed a volley of epithets which Julia received 
standing. But when her mother’s voice grew to a scream, 
Julia took the word. 

“ Mother, hush ! ” 

It was the first word of resistance she had ever uttered. 
The agony within must have been terrible to have wrung it 
from her. The mother was stunned with anger and astonish- 
ment. She could not recover herself enough to speak until Jule 
had fled half-way up the stairs. Then her mother covered her 
defeat by screaming after her, “ Go to your own room, you im- 
pudent hussy ! You know I am liable to die of heart-disease any 
minute, and you want to kill me ! ” 


26 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER III. 


A FAREWELL. 



RS. ANDERSON felt that she had made a 
mistake. She had not meant to tell Julia that 
August was to leave. But now that this stormy 
scene had taken place, she thought she could 
make a good use of it. She knew that her hus- 
band co-operated with her in her opposition to “ the Dutchman,” 
only because he was afraid of his wife. In his heart, Samuel 
Anderson could not refuse anything to his daughter. Denied 
any of the happiness which most* men find in loving their wives, 
he found consolation in the love of his daughter. Secretly, as 
though his paternal affection were a crime, he caressed Julia, and 
his wife was not long in discovering that the father cared more 
for a loving daughter than for a shrewish wife. She watched 
him jealously, and had come to regard her daughter as one who 
had supplanted her in her husband’s affections, and her husband 
as robbing her of the love of her daughter. In truth, Mrs. 
Samuel Anderson had come to stand so perpetually on guard 
against imaginary encroachments on her rights, that she saw 


A FAREWELL. 


27 


enemies everywhere. She hated Wehle because he was a Dutch- 
man ; she would have hated him on a dozen other scores if he 
had been an American. It was offense enough that Julia loved 
him. 

So now she resolved to gain her husband to her side by her 
version of the story, and before dinner she had told him how 
August had charged her with being false and cruel to Andrew 
many years ago, and how Jule had thrown it up to her, and how 
near she had come to dropping down with palpitation of the 
heart. And Samuel Anderson reddened, and declared that he 
would protect his wife from such insults. The notion that he 
protected his wife was a pleasant fiction of the little man’s, 
which received a generous encouragement at the hands of his 
wife. It was a favorite trick of hers to throw herself, in a meta- 
phorical way, at his feet, a helpless woman, and in her feeble- 
ness implore his protection. And Samuel felt all the courage 
of knighthood in defending his inoffensive wife Under cover 
of this fiction, so flattering to the vanity of an overawed hus- 
band, she had managed at one time or anothei to embroil him 
with almost all the neighbors, and fiis refusal t <j join fences had 
resulted in that crooked arrangement known as a “devil’s 
lane ” on three sides of his farm. 

Julia dared not stay away from dinner, which was mis- 
erable enough. She did not venture so much as to look at 
August, who sat opposite her, and who was the most unhappy 
person at the table, because he did not know what all the unhap- 
piness was about. Mr. Anderson’s brow foreboded a storm, Mrs. 
Anderson’s face was full of an earthquake, Cynthy Ann was 
sitting in shadow, and Julia’s countenance perplexed him. 
Whether she was angry with him or not, he could not be sure. 


28 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Of one thing he was certain : she was suffering a great deal, and 
that was enough to make him exceedingly unhappy. 

Sitting through his hurried meal in this atmosphere sur- 
charged with domestic electricity, he got the notion — he could 
hardly tell how — that all this lowering of the sky had some- 
thing to do with him. What had he done ? Nothing. His 
closest self-examination told him that he had done no wrong. 
But his spirits were depressed, and his sensitive conscience con- 
demned him for some unknown crime that had brought about 
all this disturbance of the elements. The ham did not seem very 
good, the cabbage he could not eat, the corn-dodger choked him, 
he had no desire to wait for the pie. He abridged his meal, and 
went out to the bam to keep company with his horses and 
his misery until it should be time to return to his plow. 

Julia sat and sewed in that tedious afternoon She would 
have liked one more interview with August before his departure. 
Looking through the open hall, she saw him leave the barn 
and go toward his plowing. Not that she looked up. Hawk 
never watched chicken more closely than Mrs. Anderson watched 
poor Jule. But out of the comers of her eyes Julia saw him 
drive his horses before him from the stable. As the field in 
which he worked was on the other side of the house from 
where she sat she could not so much as catch a glimpse of him 
as he held his plow on its steady course. She wished she might 
have helped Cynthy Ann in the kitchen, for then she could have 
seen him, but there was no chance for such a transfer. 

Thus the tedious afternoon wore away, and just as the sun 
was settling down so that the shadow of the elm in the front- 
yard stretched across the road into the cow-pasture, the dead 
silence was broken. Julia had been wishing that somebody 


A FAREWELL. 


29 


would speak. Her mother’s sulky speechlessness was worse than 
her scolding, and Julia had even wished her to resume her 
storming. But the silence was broken by Cynthy Ann, who 
came into the hall and called, “ Jule, I wish you would go to the 
barn and gether the eggs ; I want to make some cake.” 

Every evening of her life Julia gathered the eggs, and there 
was nothing uncommon in Cynthy Ann’s making cake, so that 
nothing could he more innocent than this request. Julia sat 
opposite the front-door, her mother sat farther along. Julia 
could see the face of Cynthy Ann. Her mother could only hear 
the voice, which was dry and commonplace enough. Julia 
thought she detected something peculiar in Cynthy’s manner. 
She would as soon have thought of the big oak gate-posts with 
their round ball-like heads telegraphing her in a sly way, as to 
have suspected any such craft on the part of Cynthy Ann, who 
was a good, pious, simple-hearted, Methodist old maid, strict 
with herself, and censorious toward others. But there stood 
Cynthy making some sort of gesture, which Julia took to mean 
that she was to go quick. She did not dare to show any eager- 
ness. She laid down her work, and moved away listlessly. And 
evidently she had been too slow. For if August had been in 
sight when Cynthy Ann called her, he had now disappeared 
on the other side of the hill. She loitered along, hoping 
that he would come in sight, but he did not, and then she 
almost smiled to think how foolish she had been in imagining 
that Cynthy Ann had any interest in her love affair. Doubtless 
Cynthy sided with her mother. 

An d so she climbed from mow to mow gathering the eggs. 
No place is sweeter than a mow, no occupation can be more 
delightful than gathering the fresh eggs— great glorious pearls, 


30 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


more beautiful than any that men dive for, despised only because 
they are so common and so useful ! But Julia, gliding about 
noiselessly, did not think much of the eggs, did not give much 
attention to the hens scratching for wheat kernels amongst the 
straw, nor to the bam swallows chattering over the adobe dwell- 
ings which they were building among the rafters above her. 
She had often listened to the love-talk of these last, but now 
her heart was too heavy to hear. She slid down to the edge of 
one of the mows, and sat there a few feet above the threshing- 
floor with her bonnet in her hand, looking off sadly and 
vacantly. It was pleasant to sit here alone and think, without 
the feeling that her mother was penetrating her thoughts. 

A little rustle brought her to consciousness. Her face was 
fiery red in a minute. There, in one corner of the threshing- 
floor, stood August, gazing at her. He had come into the bam 
to find a single-tree in place of one which had broken. While 
he was looking for it, Julia had come, and he had stood and 
looked, unable to decide whether to speak or not, uncertain how 
deeply she might be offended, since she had never once let 
her eyes rest on him at dinner. And when she had come to the 
edge of the mow and stopped there in a reverie, August had 
been utterly spell-bound. 

A minute she blushed. Then, perceiving her opportunity, 
she dropped herself to the floor and walked up to August. 

“August, you are to be turned off to-morrow night.” 

“ What have I done ? Anything wrong ? ” 

“ No.” 

“ Why do they send me away ? ” 

“Because — because — ” Julia stopped. 

But silence is often better than speech. A sudden intelligence 


A LITTLE RUSTLE BROUGHT HER TO CONSCIOUSNESS 


8 


























A FAREWELL. 


33 


came Into the blue eyes of August. “ They turn me off because 
I love Jule Anderson.” 

Julia blushed just a little. 

11 1 will love her all the same when I am gone. I will always 
love her.” 

Julia did not know what to say to this passionate speech, so 
she contented herself with looking a little grateful and very 
foolish. 

“But I am only a poor boy, and a Dutchman at that”— he 
said this bitterly— “ but if you will wait, Jule, I will show them 
I am of some account. Not good enough for you, but good 
enough for them. You will ” 

“I will wait —forever — for you, Gus.” Her head was down, 
and her voice could hardly be heard. “ Good-by.” She stretched 
out her hand, and he took it trembling. 

“Wait a minute.” He dropped the hand, and taking a pencil 
wrote on a beam: 

“March 18th, 1843.” 

“ There, that’s to remember the Dutchman by.” 

“Don’t call yourself a Dutchman, August. One day in 
school, when I was sitting opposite to you, I learned this defi- 
nition, ‘ August : grand, magnificent,’ and I looked at you and 
said, Yes, that he is. August is grand and magnificent, and 
that’s what you are. You’re just grand !” 

I do not think he was to blame. I am sure he was not re- 
sponsible. It was done so quickly. He kissed her forehead 
and then her lips, and said good-by and was gone. And she, 
with her apron full of eggs and her cheeks very red — it makes 
one warm to climb — went back to the house, resolved in some 
way to thank Cynthy Ann for sending her ; but Cynthy Ann’s 


34 


THE END OE THE WORLD. 


face was so serious and austere in its look that Julia concluded 
she must have been mistaken, Cynthy Ann couldn’t have known 
that August was in the bam. For all she said was: 

“You got a right smart lot of eggs, didn’t you? The hens 
is beginnin’ to lay more peart since the warm spell sot in.” 




A COUNTER-IRRITANT 


35 


CHAPTER IV. 


A COUNTER-IRRITANT. 



OT you kits doornt off vor? Hey?” 
Gottlieb Wehle always spoke English, or 
what he called English, when he was angry. 
“ Vot for ? Hey ? ” 

All the way home from Anderson’s on that 

§ Saturday night, August had been, in imagination, listening to 
the rough voice of his honest father asking this question, and 
he had been trying to find a satisfactory answer to it. He might 
say that Mr. Anderson did not want to keep a hand any longer. 
But that would not be true. And a young man with August’s 
clear blue eyes was not likely to lie. 

“Vot vor ton’t you not shpeak? Can’t you virshta blain 
Eenglish ven you hears it? Hey? You a’n’t no teef vot shteels 
I shposes, unt you ton’t kit no troonks mit vishky ? Yot you 
too tat you pe shamt of? Pin lazin’ rount? Kon you nicht 
Eenglish shprachen ? Oot mit id do vonst ! ” 

“ I did not do anything to be ashamed of,” said August, And 
yet he looked ashamed. 


36 


THB END OF THE WORLD. 


“ You tidn’t pe no shamt, hey ? You tidn’t ! Yot vor you 
loogs so leig a teef in der bentenshry ? Yot for you sprachen 
not mit me yen ich sprachs der blainest zort ov Eenglish mit 
you? You kooms sneaggin heim Zaturtay nocht leig a tog 
yots kot kigt, unt’s got his dail dween his leks ; and ven I 
aks you in blain Eenglish vot’s der madder, you loogs zheepish 
leig, und says you a’n’t tun nodin. I zay you tun sompin. If 



GOTTLIEB. 


you a’n’t tun nodin den, vy don’t you dell me vot It is dat you 
has tun? Hey?” 

All this time August found that it was getting harder and 
harder to tell his father the real state of the case. But the old 
man, seeing that he prevailed nothing, took a cajoling tone. 

“ Koom, August, mine knabe, ton’t shtand dare leig a vool. 
Vot tit Anterson zay ven he shent you avay?” 

“ He said that I’d been seen a-talking to his daughter, Jule 
Anderson.” 


A COUNTER-IRRITANT. 


37 


“Veil, you nebber said no lioorm doo Sbule, tkl you? If I 
dought you said vot you zboodn’t zay doo Shule, I vood shust 
drash you on der sbpot ! Tid you gwarl mit Shule, already ? ” 
“ Quarrel with Jule ! She’s the last person in the world I’d 

think of quarreling with. She’s as good as ” 

“Oh! you pe in lieb mit Shule! You vool, you! Is dat all 
dat I raise you vor? I dells you, unt dells you, unt dells you 
to sprach nodin put Deutsche, unt to marry a kood Deutsche 
vrau vot kood sprach mit you, unt now you koes right 
shtraight off unt kits knee-teep in lieb mit a vool of a Yangee 
kirl! You doo ant pe doomt off!” 

August’s countenance brightened. All the way home he had 
felt that it was somehow an unpardonable sin to be a Dutch- 
man. Anderson had spoken hardly to him in dismissing him, 
and now it was a great comfort to find that his father returned 
the contempt of the Yankees at its full value. All the conceit 
was not on the side of the Yankees. It was at least an open 
question which was the most disgraced, he or Julia, by their lit- 
tle love affair. 

But more comforting still was the quiet look of his sweet- 
faced mother, who, moving about among her throng of children 
like a hen with more chickens than she can hover,* never 
forgot to be patient and affectionate. If there had been a look 
of reproach on the face of the mother, it would have been the 
hardest trial of all. But there was that in her eyes — the dear 
Moravian mother — that gave courage to August. The mother 
was an outside conscience, and now as Gottlieb, who had lapsed 


* Not until my attention was called to this word in the proof did I know 
that in this sense it is a provincialism. It is so used, at least in half the coun- 
try, and yet neither of our American dictionaries has It. 


38 


THE BN D OP THE WORLD. 


into German for his wife’s benefit, rattled on his denunciation of 
this Canaanitish Yankee, with whom his son was in love, the 
son looked every now and then into the eyes, the still German 
eyes of the mother, and rejoiced that he saw there no reflection 
of his father’s rebuke. The older Welile presently resumed his 
English, such as it was, as better adapted to scolding. "Whether 
he thought to make his children love German by abusing them 
in English, I do not know, but it was his habit. 

“I dells you tese Yangees is Yangees. Dere neber voz 
put shust von cood vor zompin. Antrew Antershon is von. 
He Shtaid mit us ven ve vos all zick, unt he is zhust so cood as 
if he was porn in Deutschland. Put all de rest is Yangees. 
Marry a Deutsche vrau vot’s kot cood sense to ede kraut unt 
shleep unter vedder peds ven it’s kalt. Put shust led de Yan- 
gees pe Yangees.” 

Seeing August put on his hat and go to the door, he called 
out testily: 

“Vare you koes, already?” 

“ Over to the castle.” 

“Yell, das is koot. Ko doo de gassel. Antrew vill dell you 
vat sorts de Yangee kirls pel” 


AT THE CASTLE. 


39 


CHAPTER V. 

AT THE CASTLE. 

Y the time August reached Andrew Anderson’s 
rlr^' castle it was dark. The castle was built in 

a hollow, looking out toward the Ohio River, a 
river that has this peculiarity, that it is all beau- 
^ tiful, from Pittsburgh to Cairo. Through the trees, 
on which the buds were just bursting, August looked out on the 
golden roadway made by the moonbeams on the river. And 
into the tumult of his feelings there came the sweet benediction 
of Nature. And what is Nature but the voice of God ? 

Anderson’s castle was a large log building of strange con- 
struction. Everything about it had been built by the hands of 
Andrew, at once its lord and its architect. Evidently a whim- 
sical fancy had pleased itself in the construction. It was an 
attempt to realize something of medieval form in logs. There 
were buttresses and antique windows, and by an ingenious trans- 
formation the chimney, usually such a disfigurement to a log- 
house, was made to look like a round donjon keep. But it was 
strangely composite, and I am afraid Mr. Ruskin would have 
considered it somewhat confused; for while it looked like a 


40 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


rude castle to those who approached it from the hills, it looked 
like something very different to those who approached the 
front, for upon that side was a portico with massive Doric 
columns, which were nothing more nor less than maple logs. 
Andrew maintained that the natural form of the trunk of a tree 
was the ideal and perfect form of a pillar. 

To this picturesque structure, half castle, half cabin, with 
hints of church and temple, came August Wehle on Saturday 
evening. He did not go round to the portico and knock at the 
front-door as a stranger would have done, but in behind the 
donjon chimney he pulled an alarm-cord. Immediately the 
head of Andrew Anderson was thrust out of a Gothic hole — 
you could not call it a window. His uncut hair, rather darker 
than auburn, fell down to his waist, and his shaggy red beard 
lay upon his bosom. Instead of a coat he wore that unique gar- 
ment of linsey-woolsey known in the West as wa’mus (warm 
us ?), a sort of over-shirt. He was forty-five, but there were 
streaks of gray in his hair and beard, and he looked older by 
ten years. 

“ What ho, good friend ? Is that you ? ” he cried. “ Come 
up, and right welcome ! ” For his language was as archaic and 
perhaps as incongruous as his architecture. And then throwing 
out of the window a rope-ladder, he called out again, “ Ascend ! 
ascend ! my brave young friend ! ” 

And young Wehle climbed up the ladder into the large upper 
room. For it was one peculiarity of the castle that the upper 
part had no visible communication with the lower. Except 
August, and now and then a literary stranger, no one but the 
owner was ever admitted to the upper story of the house, and 
the neighbors, who always had access to the lower rooms, re- 



THE CASTLE. 








. 































































































































































































AT THE) CASTLE. 


43 


garded the upper part of the castle with mysterious awe. 
August was often plied with questions about it, but he always 
answered simply that he didn’t think Mr. Anderson would like 
to have it talked about. For the owner there must have been 
some inside mode of access to the second story, but he did 
not choose to let even August know of any other way than 
that by the rope-ladder, and the few strangers who came to see 
his books were taken in by the same drawbridge. 

The room was filled with books arranged after whimsical 
associations. One set of cases, for instance, was called the 
Academy, and into these he only admitted the masters, follow- 
ing the guidance of his own eccentric judgment quite as much 
as he followed traditional estimate. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and 
Milton of course had undisputed possession of the department 
devoted to the “ Kings of Epic,” as he styled them. Sophocles, 
Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he admitted 
to his list of “ Kings of Tragedy.” Lope he rejected on literary 
grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency 
bad. He rejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but ac- 
cepted Cervantes, Le Sage, Moliere, Swift, Hood, and the then 
fresh Pickwick of Boz. To these he added the Georgia Scenes 
of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they were quite equal to Don 
Quixote. I can only stop to mention one other department in 
his Academy. One case was devoted to the “ Best Stories,” and 
an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine 
were worthy to go into such company. His purity of feeling, 
almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted 
Chaucer and some of Balzac’s, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and 
De Foe, and Walter Scott’s best, Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Ber- 
nards St. Pierre’s “Paul and Virginia,” and “Three Months 


44 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


under the Snow,” and Charles Lamb’s generally overlooked 
“ Rosamund Gray.” There were cases for “ Socrates and his 
Friends,” and for other classes. He had amused himself for 
y:;ars in deciding what books should be “ crowned,” as he called 
it, and what not. And then he had another case, called “ The 
Inferno.” I wish there was space to give a list of this depart- 
ment. Some were damned for dullness and some for coarse- 
ness. Miss Edgeworth’s Moral Tales, Darwin’s Botanic Garden, 
Rollin’s Ancient History, and a hideously illustrated copy of 
the Book of Martyrs were in the first-class, Don Juan and some 
French novels in the second. Tupper, Swinburne, and Walt 
Whitman he did not know. 

In the corner next the donjon chimney was a little room 
with a small fireplace. Thus the hermit economized wood, for 
wood meant time, and time meant communion with his books. 
All of his domestic arrangements were carried on after this frugal 
fashion. In the little room was a writing-desk, covered with 
manuscripts and commonplace books. 

“ Well, my young friend, you’re thrice welcome,” said Andrew, 
who never dropped his book language. “ What will you have ? 
Will you resume your apprenticeship under Goethe, or shall we 
canter to Canterbury with Chaucer ? Grand old Dan Chaucer ! 
Or, shall we study magical philosophy with Roger Bacon — the 
Friar, the Admirable Doctor ? or read good Sir Thomas More ? 
What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thought that 
he would be admired by two such people as you and I, in the 
woods of America, in the nineteenth century? But you do not 
want books ! Ah ! my brave friend, you are not well. Come 
into my cell and let us talk. What grieves you ? ” 

And Andrew took him by the hand with the courtesy of a 


AT THE CASTLE, 


45 



knight, with the tenderness of a woman, and with the air of an 
astrologer, and led him into the apartment of a monk. 

“ See ! ” he said, “ I have made a new chair. It is the high*- 


THE SEDELIUM AT THE CASTLE. 

est evidence of my love for my Teutonic friend. You have 
now a right to this castle. You shall be perpetually welcome. 
I said to myself, German scholarship shall sit there, and the 


46 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Backwoods Philosopher will sit here. So sit down on my 
sedilium, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant world 
treats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me. 
But I have had my revenge on it ! I have been revenged ! I 
have done as I pleased, and defied the world and all its hollow 
conventionalities.” These last words were spoken in a tone of 
misanthropic bitterness common to Andrew. His love for 
August was the more intense that it stood upon a background 
of general dislike, if not for the world, at least for that portion 
of it which most immediately surrounded him. 

August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye 
straw and hickory splints. He knew that all this formality and 
apparent pedantry was superficial. He and Andrew were bosom 
friends, and as he had often opened his heart to the master of 
the castle before, so now he had no difficulty in telling him his 
troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriate quotations which An- 
drew made from time to time by way of embellishment. 


THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER. 


47 


CHAPTER VI. 

THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER. 


reason for Andrew’s love of August Wehle 
Y was k e was a German. Far from sharing 

in the prejudices of his neighbors against foreign- 
ers, Andrew had so thorough a contempt for his 
neighbors, that he liked anybody who did not 
belong to his own people. If a Turk had emigrated to Clark 
township, Andrew would have fallen in love with him, and 
built a divan for his special accommodation. But he loved 
August also for the sake of his gentle temper and his genuine 
love for books. And only August or August’s mother, upon 
whom Andrew sometimes called, could exorcise his demon of 
misanthropy, which he had nursed so long that it was now hard 
to dismiss it. 

Andrew Anderson belonged to a class noticed, I doubt not, 
by every acute observer of provincial life in this country. In 
backwoods and out-of-the-way communities literary culture pro- 
duces marked eccentricities in the life. Your bookish man at 
the West has never learned to mark the distinction between 



48 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


the world of ideas and the world of practical life. Instead of 
writing poems or romances, he falls to living them, or at 
least trying to. Add a disappointment in love, and you will 
surely throw him into the class of which Anderson was the 
representative. For the education one gets from books is sadly 
one-sided, unless it be balanced by a knowledge of the world. 

Andrew Anderson had always been regarded as an oddity. 
A man with a good share of ideality and literary taste, placed 
against the dull background of the society of a Western neigh- 
borhood in the former half of the century, would necessarily 
appear odd. Had he drifted into communities of more cul- 
ture, his eccentricity, begotten of a sense of superiority to his 
surroundings, would have worn away. Had he been happily 
married, his oddities would have been softened ; but neither of 
these things happened. He told August a very different his- 
tory. For the confidence of his “ Teutonic friend ” had awak- 
ened in the solitary man a desire to uncover that story which 
he had kept under lock and key for so many years. 

“ Ah ! my friend,” said he with excitement, “ don’t trust the 
faith of a woman.” And then rising from his seat he said, 
“ The Backwoods Philosopher warns you. I pray you give good 
heed. I do not know Julia. She is my niece. It ill becomes 
me to doubt her sincerity. But I know whose daughter she is. 
I pray you give good heed, my Teutonic friend. I know whose 
daughter she is! 

“I do not talk much. But you have arrived at a critical 
point— a point of turning. Out of his own life, out of his own 
sorrow, the Backwoods Philosopher warns you. I am at peace 
now. But look at me. Do you not see the marks of the 
ravages of a great storm ? A sort of a qualified happiness I 



■W/////A 


///////l 7T// ////////////// 


Z/////J V//yf///// k ' / J 

W// Wy//W/M A 


Y/777Zi 


tj njpi ,,}r7r TL 



















































I 


















































I 

















THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER. 


51 


have in philosophy. But what I might have been if the storm 
had not torn me to pieces in my youth — what I might have 
been, that I am not. I pray you never trust in a woman’s keep- 
ing the happiness of your life ! ” 

Here Andrew slipped his arm through Wehle’s, and began 
to promenade with him in the large apartment up and down an 
alley, dimly lighted by a candle, between solid phalanxes of 
books. 

“ I pray you give good heed,” he said, resuming. “ I was 
always eccentric. People thought I was either a genius or fool. 
Perhaps I was much of both. But this is a digression. I did 
not pay any attention to women. I shunned them. I said that 
to be a great author and a philosophical thinker, one must not 
be a man of society. I never went to a wood-chopping, to an 
apple-peeling, to a corn-shucking, to a barn -raising, nor indeed to 
any of our rustic feasts. I suppose this piqued the vanity of the 
girls, and they set themselves to catch me. I suppose they 
thought that I would be a trophy worth boasting. I have 
noticed that hunters estimate game according to the difficulty of 
getting it. But this is a digression. Let us return. 

“ There came among us, at that time, Abigail Norman. She 
was pretty. I swear by all the sacred cats of Egypt, that she 
was beautiful. She was industrious. The best housekeeper in 
the state ! She was high-strung. I liked her all the more for 
that. You see a man of imagination is apt to fall in love with 
a tragedy queen. But this is a digression. Let us return. 

“ She spread her toils in my path. While I was wandering 
through the woods writing poetry to birds and squirrels, Abby 
Norman was ambitious enough to hope to make me her slave, 
and she did. She read books that she thought I liked. She 


52 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


planned in various ways to seem to like wliat I liked, and yet 
she had sense enough to differ a little from me, and so make 
herself the more interesting. I think a man of real intellect 
never likes to have a man or woman agree with him entirely 
But let us return. 

“ I loved Abigail desperately. No, I did not love Abigail 
Norman at all. I did not love her as she was, but I loved her 
as she seemed to my imagination to be. I think most lovers 
love an ideal that hovers in the air a little above the real reci- 
pient of their love. And I think we men of genius and imagin- 
ation are apt to love something very different from the real 
person, which is unfortunate. 

“ But I am digressing again. To return : I wrote poetry to 
Abby. I courted her. I cut off my long hair for a woman, like 
Samson. I tried to dress more decently, and made myself 
ridiculous no doubt, for a man can not dress well unless he 
has a talent for it. And I never had a genius for beau-knots. 

“ But pardon the digression. Let us return. I was to have 
married her. The day was set. Then I found accidentally that 
she was engaged to my brother Samuel, a young man with better 
manners than mind. She made him believe that she was only 
making a butt of me. But I think she really loved me more 
than she knew. When I had discovered her treachery, I shipped 
on the first flat-boat. I came near committing suicide, and should 
have jumped into the river one night, only that I thought it 
might flatter her vanity. I came back here and ignored her. 
She broke with Samuel and tried to regain my affections. I 
scorned her. I trod on her heart ! I stamped her pride into 
the dust ! I was cruel. I was contemptuous. I was well-nigh 
insane. Then she went back to Samuel, and made hirn marry 


THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER. 


53 


tier. Then she forced my imbecile old father, on his death-bed, 
to will all the property to Samuel, except this piece of rough 
hill -land and one thousand dollars. But here I built this 
castle. My thousand dollars I put in books. I learned how 
to weave the coverlets of which our country people are so fond, 
and by this means, and by selling wood to the steamboats, I have 
made a living and bought my library without having to work 
half of my time. I was determined never to leave. I swore 
by all the arms of Vishnu she should never say that she had 
driven me away. I don’t know anything about Julia. But I 
know whose daughter she is. My young friend, beware ! I 
pray you take good heed l The Backwoods Philosopher warns 
your* 


54 


THE END OF THE WORLD 


CHAPTER VII. 

WITHIN AND WITHOUT. 



the gentleman is not bom in a man, it can not 
be bred in him. If it is bom in him, it can not be 
bred out of him. August Wehle had inherited from 
his mother the instinct of true gentlemanliness. And 
now, when Andrew relapsed into silence and abstrac- 
tion, he did not attempt to rouse him, but bidding him good- 
night, with his own hands threw the rope-ladder out the window 
and started up the hollow toward home. The air was sultry 
and oppressive, the moon had been engulfed, and the first thun- 
der-cloud of the spring was pushing itself up toward the zenith, 
while the boughs of the trees were quivering with a premon- 
itory shudder. But August did not hasten. The real stomi was 
within. Andrew’s story had raised doubts. When he went 
down the ravine the love of Julia Anderson shone upon his 
heart as benignly as the moon upon the waters. Now the light 
was gone, and the black cloud of a doubt had shut out his 
peace. Jule Anderson’s father was rich. He had not thought of 
it before ! But now he remembered how much woodland he 



WITHIN AND WITHOUT. 


55 


owned and how he had two large farms. Jule Anderson 
would not marry a poor boy. And a Dutchman ! She was not 
sincere. She was trifling with him and teasing her parents. Or, 
if she were sincere now, she would not be faithful to him 
against every tempting offer. And he would have to drive on 
the rocks, too, as Andrew had. At any rate, he would not 
marry her until he stood upon some sort of equality with her. 

The wind was swaying him about in its fitful gusts, and he 
rather liked it. In his anguish of spirit it was a pleasure to 
contend with the storm. The wind, the lightning, the sudden 
sharp claps of thunder were on his own key. He felt in the 
temper of old Lear. The winds might blow and crack their 
cheeks. 

But it was not alone the suggestions of Andrew that aroused 
his suspicions. He now recalled a strange statement that 
Samuel Anderson made in discharging him. “ You said what 
you had no right to say about my wife, in talking to Julia.” 
What had he said ? Only that some woman had not treated 
Andrew “just right.” Who the woman might be he had not 
known until his present interview with Andrew. Had Julia 
been making mischief herself by repeating his words and giving 
them a direction he had not intended ? He could not have 
dreamed of her acting such a part but for the strange influence 
of Andrew’s strange story. And so he staggered on, wet to the 
skin, defying in his heart the lightning and the wind, until he 
came to the cabin of his father. Climbing the fence, for there 
was no gate, he pulled the latch-string and entered. They were 
all asleep; the hard-working family went to bed early. But 
chubby-faced Wilhelmina, the favorite sister, had set up to wait 
for August, and he now found her fast asleep in the chair. 


56 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“Wilhelmina! wake up!” he said. 

“ O August ! ” she said, opening the comer of one eye and 
yawning, “ I wasn’t asleep. I only — ah — shut my eyes a minute. 
How wet you are ! Did you go to see the pretty girl up at Mr. 
Anderson’s ? ” 

“No,” said August. 

“ O August ! she is pretty, and she is good and sweet,” and 
Wilhelmina took his wet cheeks between her chubby hands 
and gave him a sleepy kiss, and then crept off to bed. 

And, somehow, the faith of the child Wilhelmina counter- 
acted the skepticism of the man Andrew, and August felt the 
storm subsiding. 

When he looked out of the window of the loft in which he 
slept the shower had ceased as suddenly as it had come, the 
thunder had retreated behind the hills, the clouds were already 
breaking, and the white face of the moon was peering through 
the ragged rifts. 


DIGGERS WON’T LIE. 


5? 


CHAPTER VIII. 


FIGGERS WON’T LIE 



IGGERS won’t lie,” said Elder Hankins, the 
Millerite preacher. “ I say figgers won’t lie. 
When a Methodis’ talks about failin’ from grace 
he has to argy the pint. And argyments can’t 
he depended ’pon. And when a Prisbyterian 
talks about parseverance he haint got the absolute sartainty on 
his side. But figgers won’t lie noways, and it’s figgers that 
shows this yer to be the last yer of the world, and that the 
final eend of all things is approachin’. I don’t ask you to 
listen to no ’mpressions of me own, to no reasonin’ of nobody ; 
all I ask is that you should listen to the voice of the man in 
the linen-coat what spoke to Dan’ el, and then listen to the voice 
of the ’rithmetic, and to a sum in simple addition, the - simplest 
sort of addition.” 

All the Millerite preachers of that day were not quite so illit- 
erate as Elder Hankins, and it is but fair to say that the Advent- 
ists of to-day are a very respectable denomination, doing a work 
which deserves more recognition from others than it receives. 


58 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


And for the delusion which expects the world to come to an end 
Immediately, the Adventist leaders are not responsible in the 
first place. From Gnosticism to Mormonism, every religious 
delusion has grown from some fundamental error in the previ- 
ous religious teaching of the people. By the narrowly verbal 
method of reading the Scripture, so much in vogue in the polem- 
ical discussions of the past generation, and still so fervently 
adhered to by many people, the ground was prepared for Miller- 
ism. And to-day in many regions the soil is made fallow for 
the next fanaticism. It is only a question of who shall first sow 
and reap. To people educated as those who gathered in Sugar 
Grove school-house had been to destroy the spirit of the Scrip- 
ture by distorting the letter in proving their own sect right, 
nothing could be so overwhelming as Elder Hankins’s “ figgers.” 

For he had clearly studied figgers to the neglect of the other 
branches of a liberal education. His demonstration was printed 
on a large chart. He began with the seventy weeks of Daniel, 
he added in the “time and times and a half,” and what Daniel 
declared that he “ understood not when he heard,” was plain sail- 
ing to the enlightened and mathematical mind of Elder Han- 
kins. When he came to the thousand two hundred and ninety 
days, he waxed more exultant than Kepler in his supreme mo- 
ment, and on the thousand three hundred and five and thirty 
days he did what Jonas Harrison called “ the blamedest tallest 
cipherin’ he’d ever seed in all his born days.” 

Jonas was the new hired man, who had stepped into the 
shoes of August at Samuel Anderson’s. He sat by August and 
kept up a running commentary, in a loud whisper, on the sermon, 
“My feller-citizen,” said Jonas, squeezing August’s arm at a 
climax of the elder’s discourse, “ My feller-citizen, looky thar. 


FIGGEKS WON’T LIE. 


59 


won’t you? He’ll cipher the world into nothin’ in no time. 
He’s like the feller that tried to find out the valoo of a fat shoat 
when wood was two dollars a cord. ‘ Ef I can’t do it by sub- 
straction I’ll do it by long-division,’ says he. And ef this ’rith- 
metic preacher can’t make a finishment of this sublunary speer by 
addition, he’ll do it by multiplyin’. They’s only one answer in 
his book. Gin him any sum you please, and it all comes 
out 1843!” 

Now in all the region round about Sugar Grove school-house 
there was a great dearth of sensation. The people liked the 
prospect of the end of the world because it would be a spectacle, 
something to relieve the fearful monotony of their lives. Fune- 
rals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have 
been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the 
world, as described by Elder Hankins, unless it had been a first- 
class circus (with two camels and a cage of monkeys attached, so 
that scrupulous people might attend from a laudable desire to see 
the menagerie !) A murder would have been delightful to the 
people of Clark township. It would have given them some- 
thing to think and talk about Into this still pool Elder Han- 
kins threw the vials, the trumpets, the thunders, the beast with 
ten horns, the he-goat, and all the other apocalyptic symbols 
understood in an absurdly literal way. The world was to come 
to an end in the following August. Here was an excitement, 
something worth living for. 

Al l the way to their homes the people disputed learnedly 
about the “ time and times and a half,” about “ the seven heads 
and ten horns,” and the seventh vial. The fierce polemical dis- 
cussions and the bold sectarian dogmatism of the day had taught 
them anything but “ the modesty of true science,” and now the 


60 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


unsolvable problems of the centuries were taken out of the 
hands of puzzled scholars and settled as summarily and posi- 
tively as the relative merits of “ gourd - seed ” and “ flint ” corn. 
Samuel Anderson had always planted his com in the “ light ” of 
the moon and his potatoes in the “ dark ” of that orb, had 
always killed his hogs when the moon was on the increase lest 
the meat should all go to gravy, and he and his wife had care- 
fully guarded against the carrying of a hoe through the house, 
for fear “somebody might die.” Now, the preaching of the 
elder impressed him powerfully. His life had always been not 
so much a bad one as a cowardly one, and to get into heaven by 
a six months’ repentance, seemed to him a good transaction. 
Besides he remembered that there men were never married, and 
that there, at last, Abigail would no longer have any peculiar 
right to torture him. Hankins could not have ciphered him into 
Millerism if his wife had not driven him into it as the easiest 
means of getting a divorce. No doom in the next world could 
have alarmed him much, unless it had been the prospect of con- 
tinuing lord and master of Mrs. Abigail. And as for that op- 
pressed woman, she was simply scared. She was quite unwilling 
to admit the coming of the world’s end so soon. Having some 
ugly accounts to settle, she would fain have postponed the pay- 
day. Mrs. Anderson might truly have been caked a woman 
who feared God — she had reason to. 

And as for August, he would not have cared much if the 
world had come to an end, if only he could have secured one 
glance of recognition from the eyes of Julia. But Julia dared 
not look. The process of cowing her had gone on from child- 
hood, and now she was under a reign of terror. She did not yet 
know that she could resist her mother. And then she lived in 


figgers won’t lie. 


61 


mortal fear of her mother’s heart-disease. By irritating her 
she might kill her. This dread of matricide her mother held 
always over her. In vain she watched for a chance. It did 
not come. Once, when her mother’s head was turned, she 
glanced at August. But he was at that moment listening or 
trying to listen to one of Jonas Harrison’s remarks. And Au- 
gust, who did not understand the circumstances, was only able 
to account for her apparent coldness on the theory suggested 
by Andrew’s universal unbelief in women, or by supposing that 
when she understood his innocent remark about Andrew’s dis- 
appointment to refer to her mother, she had taken offense at 
it. And so, while the rest were debating whether the world 
would come to an end or not, August had a disconsolate feeling 
that the end of the world had already come. And it did not 
make him feel better to have Wilhelmina whisper, “ Oh ! but 
she is pretty, that Anderson girl— a’n’t she, August? ” 


62 


THE END OF THE WORLD* 


CHAPTER IX. 

THE NEW SINGING-MASTER. 



> E sings like an owlingale ! ” 

Jonas Harrison was leaning against the 
well-curb, talking to Cynthy Ann. He’d been 
down to the store at Brayville, he said, a listenin’ 
to ’em discuss Millerism, and seed a new sing- 
ing-master there. “Could he sing good?” Cynthy asked, rather 
to prolong the talk than to get information. 

“ Sings like an owlingale, I reckon. He’s got more seals to 
his ministry a-hanging onto his watch-chain than I ever seed. 
Got a mustache onto the top story of his mouth, somethin’ like 
a tuft of grass on the roof of a ole shed kitchen. Peart ? He’s 
the peartest-lookin’ chap I ever seed. But he a’n’t no singin’- 
master — not ef I’m any jedge of turnips. He wam’t born to 
sarve his day and generation with a tunin’ -fork. I think he’s 
a-goin’ to reckon-water a little in these parts and that he’s only 
a-playin’ singin’-master. He kin play more fiddles’n one, you 
bet a hoss ! Says he come up here fer his wholesome, and I 
guess he did. Think ef he’d a-staid where he was, he mout 










w don’t BE ONCHARITABLE, JONAS,” 


THE NEW SINGING-MASTER. 


65 


a-suffered a leetle from confinement to his room, and that room 
p’raps not more nor five foot by nine, and ruther dim-lighted 
and poor-provisioned, an’ not much chance fer takin’ exercise in 
the fresh air ! ” 

“Don’t be oncharitahle, Jonas, don’t. We’re all mis’able sin- 
ners, I s’pose ; and you know charity don’t think no evil. The 
man may be all right, ef he does wear hair on his lip. Charity 
kivers lots a sins.” 

“ Ya-as, but charity don’t kiver no wolves with wool. An’ ef 
he a’n’t a woolly wolf they’s no snakes in Jarsey, as little Ridin’ 
Hood said when her granny tried to bite her head off. I’m dead 
sot in favor of charity, and mean to gin her my vote at every 
election, but I a’n’t a-goin’ to have her put a blind-bridle on to 
me. And when a man comes to Clark township a-wearing 
straps to his breechaloons to keep hisself from leaving terry- 
firmy altogether, and a weightin’ hisself down with pewter watch- 
seals, gold-washed, and a cultivating a crap of red-top hay onto 
his upper lip, and a-lettin’ on to be a singin’ -master, I suspicions 
him. They’s too much in the git-up fer the come-out. Well, 
here’s yer health, Cynthy ! ” 

And having made this oracular speech and quaffed the hard 
limestone water, Jonas hung the clean white gourd from which 
he had been drinking, in its place against the well-curb, ar.d 
started back to the field, while Cynthy Ann carried her bucket 
of water into the kitchen, blaming herself for standing so lcng 
talking to Jonas. To Cynthy everything pleasant had a flavor 
of sinfulness. 

The pail of water was hardly set down in the sink when 
there came a knock at the door, and Cynthy found standing by 
it the strapped pantaloons, the “ red-top ” mustache, the watch- 


66 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


seals, and all the rest that went to make up the new singing- 
master. He smiled when he saw her, one of those smiles which 
are strictly limited to the lower half of the face, and are wholly 
mechanical, as though certain strings inside were pulled with 
malice aforethought and the mouth jerked out into a square 
grin, such as an ingeniously-made automaton might display. 

“ Is Mr. Anderson in ? ” 

“No, sir; he’s gone to town.’* 

“ Is Mrs. Anderson in ? ” 

And so he entered, and soon got into conversation with the 
lady of the house, and despite the prejudice which she enter- 
tained for mustaches, she soon came to like him. He smiled 
so artistically. He talked so fluently. He humored all her 
whims, pitied all her complaints, and staid to dinner, eating 
her best preserves with a graciousness that made Mrs. Ander- 
son feel how great was his condescension. For Mr. Humphreys, 
the singing-master, had looked at the comely face of Julia, and 
looked over Julia’s shoulders at the broad acres beyond ; and he 
thought that in Clark township he had not met with so fine a 
landscape, so nice a figure-piece. And with the quick eye of a 
man of the world, he had measured Mrs. Anderson, and calcu- 
lated on the ease with which he might complete the picture 
to suit his taste. 

He staid to supper. He smiled that same fascinating square 
smile on Samuel Anderson, treated him as head of the house, 
talked glibly of farming, and listened better than he talked. 
He gave no account of himself, except by way of allusion. 
He would begin a sentence thus, “When I was traveling in 
France with my poor dear mother,” etc., from which Mrs. Ander- 
son gathered that he had been a devoted son, and then he would 




THE HAWK. 




THE NEW SINGING-MASTER. 


69 


relate how he had seen something curious “ when he was dining 
at the house of the American minister at Berlin.” “This hazy 
air reminds me of my native mountains in Northern New York.” 
And then he would allude to his study of music in the Con 
servatory in Leipsic. To plain country people in an out-of- 
the-way Western neighborhood, in 1843, such a man was better 
than a lyceum full of lectures. He brought them the odor of 
foreign travel, the flavor of city, the “otherness” that every- 
body craves. 

He staid to dinner, as I have said, and to supper. He staid 
over night. He took up his board at the house of Samuel 
Anderson. Who could resist his entreaty? Did he not assure 
them that he felt the need of a home in a cultivated family? 
And was it not the one golden opportunity to have the daughter 
of the house taught music by a private master, and thus give a 
special eclat to her education ? How Mrs. Anderson hoped 
that this superior advantage would provoke jealous remarks 
on the part of her neighbors ! It was only necessary to the 
completion of her triumph that they should say she was “ stuck 
up.” Then, too, to have so brilliant a beau for Julia ! A beau 
with watch-seals and a mustache, a beau who had been to Paris 
with his mother, studied music in the Conservatory at Leipsic, 
dined with the American minister in Berlin, and done ever so 
many more wonderful things, was a prospect to delight the 
ambitious heart of Mrs. Anderson, especially as he flattered the 
mother instead of the daughter. 

“ He’s a independent citizen of this Federal Union,” said 
Jonas to Cynthy, “ carries his head like he was intimately 
’quainted with the ’merican eagle hisself. He’s playin’ this game 
sharp. He deals all the trumps to hisself, and most everything 


70 


THE END OE THE WORLD. 


besides. He’ll carry off the gal if something don’t arrest him In 
his headlong career. Jist let me git a chance vat him when 
he’s soarin’ loftiest into the amber blue above, and I’ll cut his 
kite-string fer him, and let him fall like fork-ed lightnin’ into 
a mud-puddle.” 

Cynthy said she did see one great sin that he had committed 
for sure. That was the puttin’ on of gold and costly apparel. 
It was sot down in the Bible and in the Methodist Disapline 
that it was a sin to wear gold, and she should think the poor 
man hadn’t no sort o’ regard for his soul, weighing it down with 
them things. 

But Jonas only remarked that he guessed his jewelry wam’t 
no sin. He didn’t remember nothing agin wearin’ pewter. 


AN OFFER OF HELP. 


71 


CHAPTER X. 

AN OFFER OF HELP. 



HE singing-master, Mr. Humphreys, went to 
singing-school and church with Julia in a mat- 
ter-of-course way, treating her with attention, but 
taking care not to make himself too attentive. Ex- 
cept that Julia could not endure his smile — which 
was, like some joint stock companies, strictly limited — she 
liked him well enough. It was something to her, in her monot- 
onous life under the eye of her mother, who almost never left 
her alone, and who cut off all chance for communication with 
August — it was something to have the unobtrusive attentions 
of Mr. Humphreys, who always interested her with his adven- 
tures. For indeed it really seemed that he had had more adven- 
tures than any dozen other men. How should a simple-hearted 
girl understand him? How should she read the riddle of a life 
so full of duplicity — of multiplicity — as the life of Joshua Hum- 
phreys, the music-teacher ? Humphreys intended to make love 
to her, but during the first two weeks he only aimed to gain her 
esteem. He felt that there was a clue which he had not got. 


72 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


But at last the key dropped into his hands, and he felt sure that 
the unsophisticated girl was in his power. 

Among the girls that attended Humphreys’s singing-school was 
Betsey Malcolm, the near neighbor of the Andersons. The 
singing-master often saw her at Mr. Anderson’s, and he often 
wished that Julia were as easy to win as he felt Betsey to be. 
The sensuous mouth, the giddy eyes of Betsey, showed quickly 
her appreciation of every flattering attention he paid her, and 
though in Julia’s presence he was careful how he treated her, 
yet when he, walking down the road one day, alone, met her, he 
courted her assiduously. He had not to observe any caution in 
her case. She greedily absorbed all the flattery he could give, 
only pettishly responding after a while : “ O dear ! that’s the way 
you talk to me, and that’s the way you talk to Jule sometimes, 
I s’pose. I guess she don’t mind keeping two of you as strings 
to her bow.” 

“ Two ! What do you mean, my fair friend ? 1 havn’t seen 
one, yet.” 

“Oh, no! You mean you haven’t seen two. You see one 
whenever you look in the glass. The other is a Dutchman, and 
she’s dying after him. She may flirt with you, but her mother 
watches her night and day, to keep her from running off with 
Gus Wehle.” 

Like many another crafty person, Betsey Malcolm had fairly 
overshot the mark. In seeking to separate Humphreys from 
Julia, she had given him the clue he desired, and he was not 
slow to use it, for he was almost the only person that Mrs. An- 
derson trusted alone with Julia. 

In the dusk of the evening of the very day of his talk with 
Betsey, he sat on the long front-porch with Julia. Julia liked 


AN OFFER OF HELP. 


73 


him better, or rather did not dislike him so much in the dark 
as she did in the light. For when it was light she could see 
him smile, and though she had not learned to connect a cold 
blooded face with a villainous character, she had that childish 
instinct which made her shrink from Humphreys’s square smile. 
It always seemed to her that the real Humphreys gazed at her 
out of the cold, glittering eyes, and that the smile was some- 
thing with which he had nothing to do. 

Sitting thus in the dusk of the evening, and looking out over 
the green pasture to where the nigher hills ceased and the dis- 
tant seemed to come immediately after, their distance only indi- 
cated by color, though the whole Ohio “bottom” was between, 
she forgot the Mephistopheles who sat not far away, and dreamed 
of August, the “grand,” as she fancifully called him. And he 
let her sit and dream undisturbed for a long time, until the 
darkness settled down upon the hills. Then he spoke. 

“ I — I thought,” began Humphreys, with well-feigned hesi- 
tancy, “ I thought, I should venture to offer you my assistance 
as a true and gallant man, in a matter — a matter of supreme 
delicacy — a matter that I have no right to meddle with. I 
think I have heard that your mother is not friendly to the suit of 
a young man who — who — well, let us say who is not wholly 
disagreeable to you. I beg your pardon, don’t tell me anything 
that you prefer to keep locked in the privacy of your own bo* 
som. But if I can render any assistance, you know. I have 
some little influence with your parents, maybe. If I could be the 
happy bearer of any communications, command me as your obe- 
dient servant.” 

Julia did not know what to say. To get a word to August 
was what she most desired. But the thought of using Hum- 


74 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


phreys was repulsive to her. She could not see his face in the 
gathering darkness, but she could feel him smile that same 
soulless, geometrical smile. She could not do it. She did not 
know what to say. So she said nothing. Humphreys saw that 
he must begin farther back. 

“ I hear the young man spoken of as a praiseworthy per- 
son. German, I believe ? I have always noticed a peculiar 
manliness about Germans. A peculiar refinement, indeed, and a 
courtesy that is often wanting in Americans. I noticed this 
when I was in Leipsic. I don’t think the German girls are quite 
so refined. German gentlemen in this country seem to prefer 
American girls oftentimes.” 

All this might have sounded hollow enough to a disinterested 
listener. To Julia the words were as sweet as the first rain 
after a tedious drouth. She had heard complaint, censure, in- 
nuendo, and downright abuse of poor Gus. These were the 
first generous words. They confirmed her judgment, they com* 
forted her heart, they made her feel grateful, even affection- 
ate toward the fop, in spite of his watch-seals, his curled mus- 
tache, his straps, his cold eyes, and his artificial smile. Poor 
fool you will call her, and poor fool she was. For she could 
have thrown herself at the feet of Humphreys, and thanked 
him for his words. Thank him she. did in a stammering way, 
and he did not hesitate to repeat his favorable impressions of 
Germans, after that. What he wanted was, not to break the hold 
of August until he had placed himself in a position to be next 
heir to her regard. 


THE COON-DOG ARGUMENT. 


75 


CHAPTER XL 


THE COON-DOG ARGUMENT. 



HE reader must understand that all this time Elder 
Hankins continued to bombard Clark township 
with the thunders and lightnings of the Apocalypse, 
continued to whirl before the dazed imaginations of 
his rustic hearers the wheels within wheels and the 
faces of the living .creatures of ’Zek’el, continued to cipher the 
world out of existence according to formulas in Dan’ el, marched 
out the he-goat, made the seven heads and ten horns of the 
beast do service over and over again. And all the sweet mys- 
teries of Oriental imagery, the mystic figures which unex- 
pounded give so noble a depth to the perspective of Scripture, 
were cut to pieces, pulled apart, and explained as though they 
were tricks of legerdemain. Julia was powerfully impressed, 
not by the declamations of Hankins, for she had sensibility 
enough to recoil from his vivisection of Scripture, though she had 
been all her life accustomed to hear it from other than Miller- 
ites, but she was profoundly affected by the excitement about 
her. Her father, attracted in part by the promise that there 


76 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


should be no marrying there, had embraced Millerism with 
all his heart, and was in such a state of excitement that he 
could not attend to his business. Mrs. Anderson was in con- 
tinual trepidation about it, though she tried not to believe it. 
She was on the point of rebelling and declaring that the world 
should not come to an end. But on the whole she felt that the 
government of the universe was one affair in which she would 
have to give up all hope of having her own way. Meantime 
there was no increase of religion. Some were frightened out of 
their vices for a time, but a passionate terror of that sort is the 
worst enemy of true piety. 

“ Fer my part,” said Cynthy Ann, as she walked home with 
Jonas, “ fer my part, I don’t believe none of his nonsense. John 
Wesley” (Jonas was a New-Light, and Cynthy always talked 
to him about Wesley) “knowed a heap more about Scripter 
than all the Hankinses and Millerses that ever was bom, and 
he knowed how to cipher, too, I ’low. Why didn’t he say 
the world was goin’ to wind up ? An’ our persidin’ elder is a 
heap better instructed than Hankins, and he says God don’t 
tell nobody when the world’s goin’ to wind up.” 

“ Goin’ to run down, you mean, Cynthy Ann. ’Kordin’ to 
Hankins it’s a old clock gin out in the springs, I ’low. How 
does Hankins know that ’Zek’el’s livin’ creeters means one 
thing more’n another? He talks about them wheels as nateral 
as ef he was a wagon-maker fixin’ a ole buggy. He says the 
thing’s a gone tater; no more craps of corn offen the bottom 
land, no more electin’ presidents of this free and glorious Co- 
lumby, no more Fourths, no more shootin’ crackers nor span- 
gled banners, no more nothin’. He ciphers and ciphers, and 
then spits on his slate and wipes us all out. Whenever Gabr’el 


THE COON-DOG ARGUMENT. 


Tt 


blows I’ll b’lieve it, but I won’t take none o’ Hankins’s tootin’ 
in place of it. I shan’t git skeered at no tin-horns, and as foi 
papaw whistles, why, I say Jericho wouldn’t a-tumbled for no 
sech music, and they won’t fetch down no stars that air way.” 

Here old Gottlieb Wehle, who had just joined the Miller- 
ites, came up. “ Yonas, you mags shport of de Piple. Ef dem 
vaces in der veels, and dem awvool veels in der veels, and dem 
figures vot always says aideen huntert vordy dree, ef dem tond 
mean sompin awvool, vot does dey mean ? Hey?” 

“My venerated friend and feller-citizen of forren birth,” 
said Jonas, “you hit the nail on the crown of the head squar, 
with the biggest sort ov a sledge-hammer. You gripped a-holt 
of the truth that air time like the American bird a-grippin’ the 
arries on the shield. What do they mean? That’s jest the 
question, and you Millerites allers argies like the man wha 
warranted his dog to be a good coon-dog, bekase he warn’t 
good fer nothin’ else under the amber blue. Now, my time- 
honored friend and beloved German voter, jest let me tell you 
that on the coon-dog principle you could a-wound up the trade 
and traffic of this airth any time. Fer ef they don’t mean 
1843, what do they mean? Why, 1842 or 1844, of course. 
You don’t come no coon-dog argyments over me, not while I 
remain sound in wind and limb.” 

“Goon-tog! Who zed goon-tog? Ich tidn’t, Hankins tidn’t, 
Ze’kel’s wision tidn’t zay nodin pout no goon-tog. What’s 
goon-togs cot do too mit de end of de vorld? Yonas, you pe 
a vool, maype.” 

“ The same to yerself, my beloved friend and free and en- 
lightened feller-citizen. Long may you wave, like a green bay 
boss, and a jimson-weed on the sunny side of a board-fence!” 


78 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Gottlieb hurried on, finding Jonas much harder to under- 
stand than the prophecies. 

“I hear the singing-master is goin’ to jine,” said Cynthy Ann. 
“Wonder ef they’ll take him with all his seals and straps, and 
hair on his upper lip, with the plain words of the Bible agin 
gold and costly apparel? Wonder ef he’s tuck in, too?” 

“Tuck in? He an’t one of that kind. He don’t never git 
tuck in — he tucks in. He knows which side of his bread’s got 
quince presarves onto it. I used to run second mate on the 
Dook of Orleans, and I know his kind. He’ll soar around like 
a turkey-buzzard fer a while. Presently he’ll ’light. He’s 
rusticatin’ tell some scrape blows over. An’ he’ll make some- 
thin’ outen it. Business afore pleasure is his motto. He don’t 
hang that seducin’ grin under them hawky eyes fer nothin’. 
Wait till the pious and disinterested example ’lights somc- 
wheres. Then look out for the feathers, won’t ye ! He won't 
leave nary bone. But here we air. I declare, Cynthy, this 
walk seems the shortest , when I’m in superfine, number-one 
comp’ny ! ” 

Cynthy was so pleased with this remark, that she did pen- 
ance in her mind for a week afterwards. It was so wicked 
to enjoy one’s self out of class-meeting ! 


TWO MISTAKES. 


79 


CHAPTER XII. 


TWO MISTAKES. 



T the singing-school and at the church August 
waited as impatiently as possible for some sign 
of recognition from Julia. He little knew the 
fear that beset her. Having seen her hysterical 
mother prostrated for weeks by the excitement 
of a dispute with her father, it seemed to her that if she turned 
one look of love and longing toward young Wehle, whose 
sweet German voice rang out above the rest in the hymns, she 
might kill her mother as quickly as by plunging a knife into 
her heart. The steam-doctor, who was the family physician, had 
warned her and her father separately of the danger of exciting 
Mrs. Anderson’s most excitable temper, and now Julia was the 
slave of her mother’s disease. That lucky hysteria, which the 
steam-doctor thought a fearful heart-disease, had given Mrs. 
Abigail the whip-hand of husband and daughter, and she was 
not slow to know her advantage, using her heart in a most 
heartless way. 


80 


THE END OF THE WOKLD. 


August could not blame Julia for not writing, for he had 
tried to break the blockade by a letter sent through Jonas and 
Cynthy Ann, but the latter had found herself so well watched 
that the note oppressed her conscience and gave a hangdog 
look to her face for two weeks before she got it out of her 
pocket, and then she put it under the pillow of Julia’s bed, and 
had reason to believe that the suspicious Mrs. Anderson confis- 
cated it within five minutes. For the severity of maternal 
government was visibly increased thereafter, and Julia received 
many reminders of her ingratitude and of her determination to 
kill her self-sacrificing mother by her stubbornness. 

“ Well,” Mrs. Anderson would say, “ it’s all one to me 
whether the world comes to an end or not. I should like to 
live to see the day of judgment. But I shan’t. No affectionate 
mother can stand such treatment as I receive from my own 
daughter. If Norman was only at home ! ” 

It is proper to explain here that Norman was her son, in 
whom she took a great deal of comfort when he was away, and 
whom she would have utterly spoiled by indulgence if he had 
not been born past spoiling. He was the only person to whom 
she was indulgent, and she was indulgent to him chiefly be- 
cause he was so weak of will that there was not much glory 
in conquering him, and because her indulgence to him was a 
rod of affliction to the rest of her family. 

Failing to open communication through Jonas and Cynthy 
Ann, August found himself in a desperate strait, and with an 
impatience common to young men he unhappily had recourse to 
Betsey Malcolm. She often visited Julia, and twice, when Julia 
was not at meeting, he went home with the ingenuous Betsey, 
who always pretended to have something to tell him “about 


TWO MISTAKES. 


81 


Jule,” and who yet, for the pure love of mischief- making, tried 
to make him think as poorly as possible of Julia’s sincerity, 
and who, from pure love of flirtation, puckered her red lips, 
and flashed at him with her sensuous eyes, and sighed and 
blushed, or rather flushed, while she sympathized with him in 
a way that might have been perilous if he had been an Amer- 
ican instead of a constant-hearted “Dutchman,” wholly ah- 
sorbed with the image of Julia. But, so far as carrying mes- 
sages was concerned, Betsey was certainly a non-conductor. 
She professed never to be able to run the blockade with any 
communication of his. She said to herself that she wasn’t 
going to help Jule Anderson to keep all the beaus. She meant 
to capture one or the other of them if she could. And, 
indeed, she did not dream how grievous was the wrong she 
did. For she could appreciate no other feeling in the matter 
than vanity, and she could not see any particular harm in 
“ taking Jule Anderson down a peg.” And so she assured the 
anxious and already suspicious August that if she was in his 
place she should want that singing-master out of the way. 
“Some girls can’t stand people that wear jewelry and mus- 
taches and straps and such things. And Mr. Humphreys is 
very careful of her, won’t let her sit too late on the porch, and 
is very comforting in his way of talking to her. And she 
seems to like it. I tell you what it is, Gus ’’—and she looked 
at him so bewitchingly that the pure and sensitive August 
blushed, he could hardly tell why— “ I tell you Jule’s a nice 
girl, and got a nice property back of her, and I hope she 
won’t act like her mother. And, indeed, I can’t hardly believe 
she will, though the way she eyes that Humphreys makes me 
mad.” She had suggested the old doubt. A doubt is danger- 


82 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


ous when its face grows familiar, and one recognizes the “ Mon« 
sieur Tonson come again.” 

And all the message the disinterested and benevolent Betsey 
bore to Julia was to tell her exultingly that Gus had twice 
walked home with her. And they had had such a nice time ! 
And Julia, girl that she was, declared indignantly that she didn’t 
care whom he went with ; though she did care, and her eyes 
and face said so. Thus the tongue sometimes lies — or seems 
to lie — when the whole person is telling the truth. The only 
excuse for the tongue is that it will not be believed, and it 
knows that it will not be believed ! It only speaks diplo- 
matically, maybe. But diplomatic talking is bad. Better the 
truth. If Jule had known that her words would be reported 
to August, she would have bitten out her tongue rather than 
to have let it utter words that were only the cry of her 
wounded pride. Of course Betsey met August in the road 
the next morning, in a quiet hollow by the brook, and told him 
sympathizingly, almost affectionately, that she had begun to 
talk to Julia about him, and that Jule had said she didn’t care. 
So while Julia uttered a lie she spoke the truth, and while 
Betsey uttered the truth she spoke a lie, willful, malicious, and 
wicked. 

Now, in the mean time, Julia, on her side, had tried to open 
communication through the only channel that offered itself. She 
did not attempt it by means of Betsey, because, being a woman, 
she felt instinctively that Betsey was not to be trusted. But 
there was only one other to whom she was allowed to speak, 
except under a supervision as complete as it was unacknowl- 
edged. That other was Mr. Humphreys. He evinced a con- 
stant interest in her affairs, avowing that he always did have 


TWO MISTAKES. 


83 


a romantic desire to effect the union of suitable people, even 
though it might pain his heart a little to see another more 
fortunate than himself. Julia had given up all hope of commu- 
nicating by letter, and she could not bring herself to make 
any confessions to a man who had such a smile and such eyes, 
but to a generous proposition of Mr. Humphreys that he should 
see August and open the way for any communication between 
them, she consented, scarcely concealing her eagerness. 

August was not in a mood to receive Humphreys kindly. He 
hated him by intuition, and a liking for him had not been 
begotten by Betsey’s assurances that he was making headway 
with Julia. August was riding astride a bag of corn on his 
way to mill, when Humphreys, taking a walk, met him. 

“A pleasant day, Mr. Wehle!” 

“ Yes,” said August, with a courtesy as mechanical as Hum- 
phreys’s smile. 

The singing-master was rather pleased than otherwise to see 
that August disliked him. It suited his purpose just now to 
gall Wehle into saying what he would not otherwise have said. 

“ I hear you are in trouble,” he proceeded 

“How so?” 

“ Oh ! I hear that Mrs. Anderson doesn’t like Dutchmen.” 
The smile now seemed to have something of a sneer in it. 

“I don’t know that that is your affair,” said August, all 
his suspicions, by a sort of “ resolution of force,” changing into 
anger. 

« Oh f I beg pardon,” with a tone half-mocking. “ I did 
not know but I might help settle matters. I think I have 
Mrs. Anderson’s confidence, and I know that I have Miss 
Anderson’s confidence in an unusual degree. I think a great 


84 


THE END OF THE WOKLD. 


deal of her. And she thinks me her friend at least. I thought 
that there might be some little matters yet unsettled between 
you two, and she suggested that maybe there might be some- 
thing you would like to say, and that if you would say it to 
me, it would be all the same as if it were said to her. She 
considers that in the relation I bear to her and the family, 
a message delivered to me is the same in effect as if given to 
her. I told her I did not think you would, as a gentleman, 
wish to hold her to any promises that might be irksome to her 
now.” 

These words were spoken with a coolness and malicious- 
ness of good-nature quite devilish, and August’s fist involun- 
tarily doubled itself to strike him, if only to make him cease 
smiling in that villainous rectangular way. But he checked 
himself 

“ You are a puppy. Tell that to Jule, if you choose. I shall 
send her a release from all obligations, but not by the hand 
of a rascal ! ” 

Like all desperadoes, Humphreys was a coward. He could 
shoot, but he could not fight, and just now he was affecting 
the pious or at least the high moral role, and had left his 
pistols, brandy-flasks, and the other necessary appurtenances 
of a gentleman, locked in his trunk. Besides it would not at 
all have suited his purpose to shoot. So in lieu of shooting he 
only smiled, as August rode off, that same old geometric smile, 
the elements of which were all calculated. He seemed inca- 
pable of any other facial contortion. It expressed one emo- 
tion, indeed, about as well as another, and was therefore as 
convenient as those pocket-knives which affect to contain a chest 
of tools in one. 


8f; 








TWO MISTAKES. 


87 


Julia was already stung to jealousy by Betsey Malcolm’s 
mischief-making, and it did not require much more to put her 
into a frenzy. As they walked home from meeting the next 
night — they had meeting all nights now, the world would 
soon end and there was so much to be done — as they walked 
home Humphreys contrived to separate Julia from the rest, 
and to tell her that he had had a conversation with young 
Wehle. 

“It was painful, very painful,” he said, “I think I had 
better not say any more about it.” 

“Why ?” asked Julia in terror. 

“ Well, I feel that your grief is mine. I have never felt 
so much interest in any one before, and I must say that I was 
grievously disappointed. This young man is not at all worthy 
of you.” 

“ What do you mean ? ” And there was a trace of indigna- 
tion in her tone. 

“ It does seem to me that the man who has your love 
should be the happiest in the world; but he refused to send 
you any message, and says that he will soon send you an entire 
release from all engagement to him. He showed no tender- 
ness and made no inquiry.” 

The weakest woman and the strongest can faint. It is 
a woman’s last resort. When all else is gone, that remains. 
Julia drew a sharp quick breath, and was just about to be- 
come unconscious. Humphreys stretched his arms to catch 
her, but the sudden recollection that in case she fainted he 
would carry her into the house, produced a reaction. She 
released herself from his grasp, and hurried in alone, lock- 
ing her door, and refusing admittance to her mother. From 


88 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Humphreys, who had put himself into a delicate minor key t 
Mrs. Anderson got such an account of the conversation as he 
thought best to give. She then opened and read a note placed 
into her hand by a neighbor as she came out from meeting. 
It was addressed to Julia, and ran : 

“ If all they say is true, you have quickly changed. I do 
not hold you by any promises you wish to break. 

“ August Wehle.” 

Mrs. Anderson had no pity. She hesitated not an instant. 
Julia’s door was fast. But she went out upon the front 
upper porch, and pushing up the window of her daughter’s 
. room as remorselessly as she had committed the burglary on her 
private letter, she looked at her a moment, sobbing on the bed, 
and then threw the letter into the room, saying : “ It’s good for 
you. Read that, and see what a fellow your Dutchman is.” 

Then Mrs. Anderson sought her couch, and slept with a 
serene sense of having done her duty as a mother, whatever 
might be the result. ■ 


THE SPIDER SPINS. 


89 


CHAPTER XIII. 



THE SPIDER SPINS. 

ULIA got up from her bed the moment that 
her mother had gone. Her first feeling was that her 
privacy had been shamefully outraged. A true 
mother should honorably respect the reserve of the 
little child. But Julia was now a woman, grown, 
with a woman’s spirit. She rose from her bed, and shut her 

window with a bang that was meant to be a protest. She then 
put the tenpenny nail sometimes used to fasten the window 
down, in its place, as if to say, “ Come in, if you can.” Then 
she pulled out the folds of the clrutz curtain, hanging on its 
draw-string half-way up the window. If there had been any 
other precaution possible, she would have taken it. But there 
was not. 

She took up the note, and read it. Julia was not a girl of 
keen penetration. Her training was that of a country life. She 
did not read between the lines of August’s note, and could only 
understand that she was dismissed. Outraged by her mother’s 
tyranny, spurned by her lover, she stood like a hunted creature, 
brought to bay, looking for the last desperate chance for escape. 

Crushed? No. If she had been weaker, if she had been 
of the quieter, frailer sort, instead of being, as she was, elastic, 
impulsive, recuperative, she might have been crushed. She was 


00 


THE END OP The WORLD. 


wounded in her heart of hearts, but all her pride and hardihood, 
of which she had not a little, had now taken up arms against 
outrageous fortune. She was stung at every thought of August 
and his letter, of Betsey Malcolm and her victory, of the fact 
that her mother had read the letter and knew of her humili- 
ation. And she paced the floor of her room, and resolved to 
resist and to be revenged. She would marry anybody, that 
she might show Betsey and August they had not broken her 
heart and that her love did not go begging. 

O Julia ! take care. Many another woman has jumped off 
that precipice! 

And she would escape from her mother. The indications of 
affection adroitly given by Humphreys were all remembered now. 
She could have him, and she would. He would take her to 
Cincinnati. She would have her revenge all around. I am 
sorry to show you my heroine in this mood. But the fairest 
climes are sometimes subject to the fiercest hurricanes, the 
frightfulest earthquakes ! 

After an hour the room seemed hot. She pulled back the 
chintz curtain and pushed up the window. The blue-grass in 
the pasture looked cool as it drank the heavy dews. She 
climbed through the window on to the long, old-fashioned upper 
porch. She sat down upon an old-fashioned settee with rock- 
ers, and began to rock. The motion relieved her nervous- 
ness and fanned her hot cheeks. Yes, she would accept the 
first respectable lover that offered. She would go to the city 
with Humphreys, if he asked her. It is only fair to say that 
Julia did not at all consider— she was not in a temper to con- 
sider— what a marriage with Humphreys implied. She only 
thought of it on two sides— the revenge upon August and 


The spider spins. 


91 


Betsey, and the escape from a thralldom now grown more bitter 
than death. True, her conscience was beginning to awaken, 
and to take up arms against her resolve. But nothing could be 
plainer. In marrying Mr. Humphreys she should many a 
friend, the only friend she had. In marrying him she would 



TEMPTED. 


satisfy her mother, and was it not her duty to sacrifice something 
to her mother’s happiness, perhaps her mother’s life? 

Yes, yes, Julia, a false spirit of self-sacrifice is another path 
over the cliff ! In such a mood as this all paths lead into the 
abyss. 

Her mind was made up. She braced her will against all 


02 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


the relentings of her heart. She wished that Humphreys, who 
had indirectly declared his love so often, were there to offer at 
once. She would accept him immediately, and then the whole 
neighborhood should not say that she had been deserted by 
a Dutchman. For in her anger she found her mother’s epithets 
expressive. 

He was there! Was it the devil that planned it? Does 
he plan all those opportunities for wrong that are so sure to 
offer themselves? Humphreys, having led a life that turned 
night into day, sat at the farther end of the long upper porch, 
smoking his cigar, waiting a bed-time nearer to the one to 
which he was accustomed. 

Did he suspect the struggle in the heart of Julia Anderson ? 
Did he guess that her pride and defiance had by this time 
reached high-water mark ? Did he divine this from seeing 
her there ? He rose and started in through the door 
of the upper hall, the only opening to the porch, except 
the window. But this was a feint. He turned back and 
sat himself down upon the farther end of the settee from 
Julia. He understood human nature perfectly, and had 
had long practice in making gradual approaches. He begged 
her pardon for the bungling manner in which he had com- 
municated intelligence that must be so terrible to a heart so 
sensitive ! Julia was just going to declare that she did not care 
anything for what August said or thought, but her natural truth- 
fulness checked the transparent falsehood. She had not gone 
far enough astray to lie consciously ; she was, as yet, only telling 
lies to herself. Very gradually and cautiously did he proceed so 
as not to “flush the bird.” Even as I saw, an hour ago, a 
cat creep upon a sparrow with fascinating eyes, and a waving, 


THE SPIDER SPINS. 


03 


<?nake-like motion of the tail, and a treacherous feline smile upon 
her face, even so, cautiously and by degrees, Humphreys felt 
his way with velvet paws toward his prey. He knew the 
opportunity, that once gone might not come again; he soon 
guessed that this was the hour and power of darkness in the 
soul of Julia, the hour in which she would seek to flee from 
her own pride and mortification. And if Humphreys knew 
how to approach with a soft tread, very slowly and cautiously, 
he also knew — men of his “ profession ” always know — when 
to spring. He saw the moment, he made the spring, he seized 
the prey. 

“Will you trust your destiny to me, Miss Anderson? You 
seem beset by troubles. I have means. I could not but be 
wholly devoted to your welfare. Let me help you to flee away 
from — from all this mortification, and this — this domestic tyr- 
anny. Will you intrust yourself to me?” 

He did not say anything about love. He had an instinctive 
feeling that it would not be best. She felt herself environed 
with insurmountable difliculties, threatened with agonies worse 
than death— so they seemed to her. He simply, coolly opened 
the door, and bade her easily and triumphantly escape. Had he 
said one word of tenderness the reaction must have set in. 

She was silent. 

“ I did hope, by sacrificing all my own hopes, to effect a 
reconciliation. But when that young man spoke insulting words 
about you, I determined at once to offer you my devoted pro- 
tection. I ask no more than you are able to give, your respect. 
Will you accept my life-long protection as your husband ? ” 

“Yes!” said the passionate girl in an agony of despair. 


94 


THE END OP THE WORLD, 


CHAPTER XIV. 


THE SPIDER’S WEB. 



OW that Humphreys had his prey he did not 
know just what to do with it. Not know- 
ing what to say, he said nothing, in which he 
showed his wisdom. But he felt that saying nothing 
was almost as had as saying something. And he 
was right. For with, people of impulsive temperament reac- 
tions are sudden, and in one minute after Julia had said yes, 
there came to her memory the vision of August standing in the 
barn and looking into her eyes so purely and truly and loyally, 
and vowing such sweet vows of love, and she looked back upon 
that perfect hour with some such feeling perhaps as Dives 
felt looking out of torment across the great gulf into paradise. 
Only that Dives had never known paradise, while she had. For 
the man or woman that knows a pure, self-sacrificing love, 
returned in kind, knows that which, of all things m this world, 
lies nearest to God and heaven. There be those who have ears 
to hear this, and for them is it written. Julia thought of 
August’s love with a sinking into despair. But then returned 


THE SPIDER’S WEB. 


95 


the memory of his faithlessness, of all she had been compelled 
to believe and suffer. Then her agony came back, and she was 
glad that she had taken a decided step. Any escape was a 
Telief. I suppose it is under some such impulse that people 
kill themselves. Julia felt as though she had committed suicide 
and escaped. 

Humphreys od his part was not satisfied. I used the 
wrong figure of speech awhile ago. He was not a cat with 
paw upon the prey. He was only an angler, and had but 
hooked his fish. He had not landed it yet. He felt how slender 
was the thread of committal by which he held Julia. August 
had her heart. He had only a word. The slender vantage 
that he had, he meant to use adroitly, craftily. And he 
knew that the first thing was to close this interview 
without losing any ground. The longer she remained bound, 
the better for him. And with his craft against the country 
girl’s simplicity it would have fared badly with Julia had it not 
been for one defect which always inheres in a bad man’s plots 
in such a case. A man like Humphreys never really understands 
a pure woman. Certain detached facts he may know, but he can 
not “ put himself in her place.” 

Humphreys remarked with tenderness that Julia must not stay 
in the night air. She was too precious to be exposed. This 
flattery was comforting to her wounded pride, and she found 
his words pleasant to her. Had he stopped here he might have 
left the field victorious. But it was very hard for an affianced 
lover to stop here. He must part from her in some other way 
than this if he would leave on her mind the impression that 
she was irrevocably bound to him. He stooped quickly with a 
well-affected devotion and lifted her hand to kiss it. That act 


96 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


awakened Julia Anderson. She must have awaked anyhow, 
sooner or later. But when one is in the toils of such a man, 
sooner is better. The touch of Humphreys’s hand and lips sent 
a shudder through her frame that Humphreys felt. Instantly 
there came to her a perception of all that marriage with a repul- 
sive man signifies. 

Not suicide, but perdition. 

She jerked her hand from his as though he were a snake. 

“ Mr. Humphreys, what did I say ? I can’t have you. I don’t 
love you. I’m crazy to-night. I must take back what 
I said.” 

“ No, Julia. Let me call you my Julia. You must not 
break my heart.” Humphreys had lost his cue, and every 
word of tenderness he spoke made his case more hopeless. 

“I never can marry you — let me go in,” she said, brushing 
past him. Then she remembered that her door was fast on 
the inside. She had climbed out the window. She turned back { 
and he saw his advantage. 

“I can not release you. Take time to think before you 
ask it. Go to sleep now and do not act hastily.” He stood 
between her and the window, wishing to get some word to 
which he could hold. 

Julia’s two black eyes grew brighter. “I see. You took ad- 
vantage of my trouble, and you want to hold me to my 
words, and you are bad, and now — now I hate you ! ” Then 
Julia felt better. Hate is the only wholesome thing in such a 
case. She pushed him aside vigorously, stepped upon the settee, 
slipped in at the window, and closed it. She drew the curtain, 
but it seemed thin, and with characteristic impulsiveness she 
put out her light that she might have the friendly drapery of 



97 


“NOW I HATE YOU!” 





THE SPIDER’S WEB. 


99 


darkness about her. She heard the soft — for the first time it 
seemed to her stealthy — tread of Humphreys, as he returned to 
his room. Whether she swooned or whether she slept after 
that she never knew. It was morning without any time inter- 
vening, She had a headache and could scarcely walk, and ther e 
was August’s note lying on the floor. She read it again— 
if not with more intelligence, at least with more suspicion. 
She wondered at her own hastiness. She tried to go about the 
house, but the excitement of the previous night, added to all 
she had suffered beside, had given her a headache, blinding 
and paralyzing, that sent her back to bed. 

And there she lay in that half-asleep, half-awake mood which 
a nervous headache produces. She seemed to be a fly in a 
web, and the spider was trying to fasten her. A very polite spider, 
with that smile which w'ent half-way up his face but which 
never seemed able to reach his eyes. He had straps to his 
pantaloons, and a reddish mustache, and she shuddered as he 
wound his fine webs about her. She tried to shake off the 
illusion. But the more absurd an illusion, the more it will not 
be shaken off. For see ! the spider was kissing her hand ! 
Then she seemed to have made a great effort and to have 
broken the web. But her wings were torn, and her feet were 
shackled by the fine strands that still adhered. She could not 
get them off. Wouldn’t somebody help her, even as she had 
many a time picked off the webs from a fly’s feet out of sheer 
pity? And all day she would perpetually return into these 
half-conscious states and feel the spider’s web about her feet, 
and ask over and over again if somebody wouldn’t help her to 
get out of the meshes. 

Toward evening her mother brought her a cup of tea and a 


100 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


piece of toast, and for the first time in the remembered life 
of the daughter made an endeavor to show a little tenderness for 
her. It was a clumsy endeavor, for when the great gulf is once 
fixed between mother and child it is with difficulty bridged. And 
finding herself awkward in the new role, Mrs. Anderson dropped it 
and resumed her old gait, remarking, as she closed the door, 
that she was glad to know that Julia was coming to her senses, 
and “had took the right road.” For Mrs. Abigail was more 
vigorous than grammatical. 

Julia did not see anything significant in this remark at first. 
But after a while it came to her that Humphreys must have told 
her mother of something that had passed during the preceding 
night, something on which this commendation was founded. 
Then she fell into the same torpor and was in the same old 
spider’s web, and there was the same spider with the limited 
smile and the mustache and the watch-seals and the straps ! 
And he was trying to fasten her, and she said “yes.” And 
she could see the little word. The spider caught it and spun 
it into a web and fastened her with it. And she could break 
all the other webs but those woven out of that one little word 
from her own lips. That clung to her, and she could neither 
fly nor walk. August could not help her — he would not come. 
Her mother was helping the spider. Just then Cynthy Ann came 
along with her broom. Would she see her and sweep her free ? 
She tried to call her, but alas! she was a fly. She tried to buzz, 
but her wings were fast bound with the webs. She was being 
smothered. The spider had seized her. She could not move. 
He was smiling at her ! 

Then she woke shuddering. It was after midnight. 


THE WEE BROKEN. 


101 


CHAPTER XV. 


THE WEB BROKEN. 



’OVERTY,” says Beranger, “ is always super* 
stitious.” So indeed is human extremity of 
any sort. Julia’s healthy constitution had resisted 
the threatened illness, the feverishness had gone 
with the headache. She felt now only one thing : 
she must have a friend. But the hard piousness of Cynthy 
Ann’s face had never attracted her sympathy. It had always 
seemed to her that Cynthy disapproved of her affection quite as 
much as her mother did. Cynthy’s face had indeed a chronic 
air of disapproval. A nervous young minister said that he 
never had any “liberty” when sister Cynthy Ann was in his 
congregation. She seemed averse to all he said. 

But now Julia felt that there was just one chance of getting 
advice and help. Had she not in her dream seen Cynthy Ann 
with a broom? She would ask help from Cynthy Ann. 
There must be a heart under her rind. 

But to get to her. Her mother’s affectionate vigilance never 



102 


THE end op the world. 


left her alone with Cynthy. Perhaps it was this very precau, 
tion that had suggested Cynthy Ann to her as a possible ally. 
She must contrive to have a talk with her somehow. But how ? 
There was one way. Black-eyed people do not delay. Right or 
wrong, Julia acted with sharp decision. Before she had an} 



AT CYNTHY’ S DOOR. 

very definite view of her plan, she had arisen and slipped on a 
calico dress. But there was one obstacle. Mr. Humphreys kept 
late hours, and he might be on the front-porch. She might 
meet him in the hall, and this seemed worse to her than 


THE WEB BROKEN". 


103 


would the chance of meeting a tribe of Indians. She lis- 
tened and looked out of her window ; but she could not be 
sure ; she would run the risk. With silent feet and loud-beating 
heart she went down the hall to the back upper porch, for in 
that day porches were built at the back and front of houses, 
above and below. Once on the back-porch she turned to the 
right and stood by Cynthy Ann’s door. But a new fear took 
possession of her. If Cynthy Ann should be frightened and 
scream ! 

“ Cynthy ! Cynthy Ann ! ” she said, standing by the bed in 
the little bare room which Cynthy Ann had occupied, for five 
years, but into which she had made no endeavor to bring one 
ray of sentiment or one trace of beauty. 

“ Cynthy ! Cynthy Ann ! ” 

Had Cynthy Ann slept anywhere but in the L of the house, 
her shriek — what woman could have helped shrieking a little 
when startled ?— her shriek must have alarmed the family. But 
it did not. “ Why, child ! what are you doing here ? You are 
out of your head, and you must go back to your room at 
once.” And Cynthv had arisen and was already tugging at 
Julia’s arm. 

“ I a’n’t out of my head, Cynthy Ann, and I won't go back to 
my room— not until I have had a talk with you.” 

“What is the matter, Jule?” said Cynthy, sitting on the 
bed and preparing to begin again her old fight between 
duty and inclination. Cynthy always expected temptation. She 
had often said in class-meeting that temptations abounded on 
every hand, and as soon as Julia told her she had a communi- 
cation to make, Cynthy Ann was sure that she would find in it 
gome temptation of the devil to do something she “hadn’t orter 


104 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


do,” according to the Bible or the Discipline, strictly construed 
And Cynthy was a “ strict constructionist.” 

Julia did not find it so easy to say anything now that she 
had announced herself as determined to have a conversation and 
now that her auditor was waiting. It is the worst beginning in 
the world for a conversation, saying that you intend to con- 
verse. When an Indian has announced his intention of 
having a “ big talk,” he immediately lights his pipe and relapses 
into silence until the big talk shall break out accidentally and 
naturally. But Julia, having neither the pipe nor the Indian’s 
stolidity, found herself under the necessity of beginning abruptly. 
Every minute of delay made her position worse. For every 
minute increased her doubt of Cynthy Ann’s sympathy. 

“ O Cynthy Ann ! I’m so miserable ! ” 

*' Yes, I told your ma this morning that you was looking 
mis’able, and that you had orter have sassafras to purify the 
blood, but your ma is so took up with steam-docterin’ that she 
don’t believe in nothin’ but corn-sweats and such like.” 

“ Oh ! but, Cynthy, it a’n’t that. I’m miserable in my 
mind. I wish I knew what to do.” 

“I thought you’d made up your mind. Your ma told me 
you was engaged to Mr. Humphreys.” 

Julia was appalled. How fast the spider spins his webl 

“ I a’n’t engaged to him, and I hate him. He got me to 
say yes when I was crazy, and I believe he brought about the 
things that make me feel so nigh crazy. Do you think he’s a 
good man, Cynthy Ann ? ” 

“Well, no, though I don’t want to set in nojedgment on 
nobody ; but I don’t see as how as he kin be good and wear all 
of them costly apparels that’s so forbid in the Bible, to say 


THE WEB BROKEN. 


105 


nothing of the Discipline. The Bible says you must know a 
tree by its fruits, and I ’low his’n is mostly watch-seals. I think 
a good sound conversion at the mourners’ bench would make 
him strip off some of them things, and put them into the mis- 
sionary collection. Though maybe he a’n’t so bad arter all, fer 
Jonas says that liker’n not the things a’n’t gold, but pewter 



CTNTHT ANN HAD OFTEN SAID IN CLASS-MEETING THAT TEMPTATIONS 
ABOUNDED ON EVERT HAND. 

washed over. But I’m afeard he’s wor’ly-minded. But I don’t 
want to be too hard on a feller-creatur’.” 

“ Cynthy, I drempt just now I was a fly and he was a 
spider, and that he had me all wrapped up in his web, and that 
just then you came along with a broom.” 

“ That must be a sign,” said Cynthy Ann. “ It’s good you 
didn’t dream after daylight. Then ’twould a come true. But 


106 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


what about him ? I thought you loved Gus Wehle, and though 
I’m afeard you’re makin’ a idol out o’ him, and though I’m afeard 
he’s a onbeliever, and I don’t noways like marry in' with onbe- 
lievers, yet I did want to help you, and I brought a note from 
him wunst and put it under the head of your bed. I was afeard 
then I was doin’ what Timothy forbids, when he says not 
to be pertakers in other folks’s sins, but, you see, how could I 
help doin’ it, when you was lookin’ so woebegone like, and 
Jonas, he axed me to do it. It’s awful hard to say you won’t 
to Jonas, you know. So I put the letter there, and I don’t 
doubt your ma mistrusted it, and got a holt on it.” 

“ Did he write to me ? A’n’t he going with that Betsey 
Malcolm ? ” 

“ Can’t be, I ’low. On’y this evenin’ Jonas said to me, says he, 
when I tole him you was engaged to Mr. Humphreys, says he, 
in his way, ‘ The hawk’s lit, has he ? That’ll be the death of 
two,’ says he, ‘ fer she’ll die on it, an’ so’ll poor Gus,’ says he. 
And then he went on to tell as how as Gus is all ready to leave, 
and had axed him to tell him of any news ; but he said he 
wouldn’t tell him that. He’d leave him some hope. Fer he 
says Gus was mighty nigh distracted to-day, that is yisterday, fer 
its most mornin’ I ’low.” 

Now this speech did Julia a world of good. It showed her 
that Gus was not faithless, that she might count on Cynthy, 
and that Jonas was her friend, and that he did not like Hum- 
phreys. Jonas called him a hawk. That agreed with her dream. 
He was a hawk and a spider. 

“ But, Cynthy Ann, I got a letter night before last ; ma threw 
it in the window. In it Gus said he released me. I hadn’t asked 
any release. What did he mean ? ” 


THE WEB BROKEN. 


107 


“ Honey, I wish I could help you. It’s that hawk, as Jonas 
calls him, that’s at the bottom of all this trouble. I don’t 
believe but what he’s told some lies or ’nother. I don’t believe 
but what he’s a bad man. I allers said I didn’t ’low no good 
could come of a man that puts on costly apparel and wears 
straps. I’m afeard you’re making a idol of Gus Wehle. Don’t 
do it Ef you do, God’ll take him. Misses Pearsons made a 
idol of her baby, a kissin’ it and huggin’ it every minute, and 
I said, says I, Misses Pearsons, you hadn’t better make a idol 
of a perishin’ creature. And sure enough, God tuck it. He’s 
jealous of our idols. But I can’t help helpin’ you. You’re a 
onbeliever yet yourself, and I ’low taint no sin fer you to marry 
Gus. It’s yokin’ like with like. I wish you was both Chris- 
tians. I’ll speak to Jonas. I don’t know what I ought to do, 
but I’ll speak to Jonas. He’s mighty peart about sech things, is 
Jonas, and got as good a heart as you ever see. And ” 

“ Cynth-ee A-ann ! ” It was the energetic voice of Mrs. An- 
derson rousing the house betimes. For the first time Julia and 
Cynthy Ann noticed the early light creeping in at the window. 
They sat still, paralyzed. 

“ Cynth-ee ! ” The voice was now at the top of the stairs, 
for Mrs. Anderson always carried the war into Africa if Cynthy 
did not wake at once. 

“ Answer quick, Cynthy Ann, or she’ll be in here ! ” said 
Julia, sliding behind the bed. 

“Ma’am!” said Cynthy Ann, starting toward the door, 
where she met Mrs. Abigail. “ I’m up,” said Cynthy. 

“ Well, what makes you so long a-answerin’ then ? You make 
me climb the steps, and you know I may drop down dead of 
heart-disease any day. I’ll go and wake Jule.” 


108 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“ Better let her lay awhile,” said Cynthy, reproaching herself 
instantly for the deception. 

Mrs, Anderson hesitated at the top of the stairs. 

“ Jul-yee ! ” she called. Poor Jule shook from head to foot. 
“ I guess I’ll let her lay awhile ; but I’m afraid I’ve already 
spoiled the child by indulgence,” said the mother, descending 
the stairs. She relented only because she believed Julia was 
conquered. 

“ I declare, child, it’s a shame I should be helping you to 
disobey your mother. I’m afeard the Lord’ll bring some jedg- 
ment on us yet.” For Cynthy Ann had tied her conscience to 
her rather infirm logic, Better to have married it to her 
generous heart. But before she had finished the half-penitent 
lamentation, Jule was flying with swift and silent feet down 
the hall. Arrived in her own room, she was so much 
relieved as to be almost happy; and she was none too soon, 
for her industrious mother had quickly repented her criminal 
leniency, and was again climbing the stairs at the imminent 
risk of her precarious life, and calling “ Jul-yee ! ” 


JONAS EXPOUNDS THE SUBJECT. 


109 


CHAPTER XVL 


JONAS EXPOUNDS THE SUBJECT. 



’LOWED I’d ketch you here, my venerable 
and reliable feller-citizen ! ” said Jonas as he en- 
tered the lower story of Andrew Anderson’s castle 
and greeted August, sitting by Andrew’s loom. 
It was the next evening after Julia’s interview 
with Cynthy Ann. “ When do you ’low to leave this terry- 
firmy and climb a ash-saplin’ ? To-night, hey ? Goin’ to the 
Queen City to take to steamboat life in hopes of havin’ your 
sperrits raised by bein’ blowed up ? Take my advice and 
don’t make haste in the downward road to destruction, nor the 
up-hill one nuther. A game a’n’t never through tell it’s played 
out, an’ the American eagle’s a chicken with steel spurs. 
That air sweet singer of Israel that is so hifalugeon he has 
to anchor hisself to his boots, knows all the tricks, and is inti- 
mately acquainted with the kyards, whether it’s faro, poker, 
euchre, or French monte. But blamed ef Providence a’n’t 
dealed you a better hand’n you think. Never desperandum, as 
the Congressmen say, fer while the lamp holds out to bum you 



110 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


may beat the blackleg all to flinders and sing and shout forever. 
Last night I went to bed thinkin’ ’Umphreys had the stakes all 
in his pocket. This momm’ I found he was in a far way to 
be beat outen his boots ef you stood yer ground like a man 
and a gineological descendant of Plymouth Rock ! ” 

Andrew stopped his loom, and, looking at August, said : 

“ Our friend Jonas speaks somewhat periphrastically and 
euphuistically, and — he’ll pardon me — but he speaks a little 
ambiguously.” 

“My love, I gin it up, as the fish-hawk said to the bald 
eagle one day. I kin rattle off odd sayings and big words 
picked up at Fourth-of-Julys and barbecues and big meetins, 
but when you begin to fire off your forty-pound bomb-shell book- 
words, I climb down as suddent as Davy Crockett’s coon. 
Maybe I do speak unbiguously, as you say, but I was givin’ you 
the biggest talkin’ I had in the basket. And as fer my good 
news, a feller don’t like to eat up all his country sugar to 
wunst, I ’low. But I says to our young and promisin’ friend 
of German extraction, beloved, says I, hold onto that air limb 
a little longer and you’re saved.” 

“But, Jonas,” said August, spinning Andrew’s winding- 
blade round and speaking slowly and bitterly, “ a man don’t 
like to be trifled with, if he is a Dutchman ! ” 

“ But sposin’ a man hain’t been trifled with, Dutchman or 
no Dutchman ? Sposin’ it’s all a optical delusion of the yeers ? 
There’s a word fer you , Andrew, that a’n’t nuther unbiguous 
nor peri-what-you-may-call-it.” 

“But,” said August, “Betsey Malcolm ” 

“ Betsey Malcolm /” said Jonas. “Betsey Malcolm to thun- 
der ! ” and then he whistled. “ Set a dog to mind a basket 


JONAS EXPOUNDS THE SUBJECT. 


Ill 


of meat when his chops is a- waterin’ fer it! Set a kingfisher 
to take keer of a fish-pond! Set a cat to raisin’ your orphan 
chickens on the bottle i Set a spider to nuss a fly sick with 
dyspepsy from eatin’ too much molasses! I’d ruther trust a 
hen-hawk with a flock of patridges than to trust Betsey Mal- 
colm with your affairs. I ha’n’t walked behind you from 
meetin’ and seed her head a bobbin’ like a bluebird’s and her 
eyes a blazin’ an’ all that, fer nothin’. Like as not, Betsey 
Malcolm’s more nor half your trouble in that quarter.” 

“But she said ” 

“It don’t matter three quarters of a rotten rye-straw what 
she said, my inexper’enced friend. She don’t keer what she 
says, so long as it’s fur enough away from the truth to sarve 
her turn. An’ she’s told pay-tent double-back-action lies that 
worked both ways. What do you ’low Jule Anderson tho’t 
when she heam tell of your courtin’ Betsey, as Betsey told it, 
with all her nods an’ little crowin’ ? Now looky here, Gus, 
I’m your friend, as the Irishman said to the bar that hugged 
him, an’ I want to say about all that air that Betsey told you, 
spit on the slate an’ wipe that all off. They’s lie in her soap an’ 
right smart chance of saft-soap in her lie, I ’low.” 

These rough words of Jonas brought a strange intelligence 
into the mind of August. He saw so many things in a moment 
that had lain under his eyes unnoticed. 

“ There is much rough wisdom in your speech, Jonas,” said 
Andrew. 

“That’s a fact. You and me used to go to school to old 
Benefield together when I was little and you was growed up. 
You allers beat everybody all holler in books and spellin’- 
matches, Andy. But I ’low I cut my eye-teeth ’bout as airly a a 


112 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


some of you that’s got more lamin’ under your skelp. Now, I 
say to our young friend and feller-citizen, don’t go ’way tell 
you’ve spoke a consolin’ word to a girl as’ll stick tc you tell 



JONAS. 


the hour and article of death, and then remains yours truly for- 
ever, amen.” 

“How do you know that, Jonas?” said August, smiling in 
spite of himself. 

“ How do I know it ? Why, by the testimony of a uncor- 
rupted and disinterested witness, gentlemen of the jury, if the 
honorable court pleases. What did that Jule Anderson do, poor 


JONAS EXPOUNDS THE SUBJECT. 


113 


thing, but spend some time making a most onseasonable visit to 
Cynthy Ann last night ? And I ’low ef there’s a ole gal in this 
subfomary spear as tells the truth in a bee-line and no nonsense, 
it’s that there same, individooal, identical Cynthy Ann. She’s 
most afeard to drink cold water or breathe fresh air fer fear 
she’ll commit a unpard’nable sin. And that persecuted young 
pigeon that thought herself forsooken, jest skeeted into Cynthy 
Ann’s budwoir afore daybreak this mornin’ and told her all 
her sorrows, and how your letter and your goin’ with that Betsey 
Malcolm ” — here August winced — “ had well nigh druv her to 
run off with the straps and watch-seals to get rid of you and 
Betsey and her precious and mighty affectionate ma.” 

“But she won’t look at me in meeting, and she sent Hum- 
phreys to me with an insulting message.” 

“ Which text divides itself into two parts, my brethren and 
feller-travelers to etarnity. To treat the last head first, beloved, 
I admonish you not to believe a blackleg, unless it’s under sar- 
cumstances when he’s got onusual and airresistible temptations 
to tell the truth. I don’t advise yer to spit on the slate and rub 
it out in this case. Break the slate and throw it away. To 
come to the second pertikeler, which is the first in the order 
of my text, my attentive congregation. She didn’t look at you 
in meetin’. Now, I ’spose you don’t know nothin’ of her moth- 
er’s heart-disease. Heart-disease is trumps with Abigail Ander- 
son. She plays that every turn. Just think of a young gal who 
thinks that ef she looks at her beau when her mother’s by, 
she might kill her invalooable parient of heart-disease. Fer my 
part, I don’t take no stock in Mrs. Abby Anderson’s dyin’ of 
heart-disease, no ways. Might as well talk about a whale dyin* 
of footrot.” 


114 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“Well, Jonas, what counsel do you give our young friend? 
Your sagacity is to be depended on.” 

“ Why, I advise him to speak face to face with the angel of 
his life. Let him climb into my room to-night. Leave mcetin’ 
jest afore the benediction — he kin do without that wunst — and 
go double-quick acrost the fields, and git safe into my stoodia. 
Fertlier pertikelers when the time arrives.” 


thf. wrong pew. 


115 


CHAPTER XVII. 

THE WRONG PEW. 

^ UGUSTS own good sense told him that the 
adviee of Jonas was not good. But he had made 
many mistakes of late,’ and was just now inclined 
to take anybody’s judgment in place of his own. 

Sr All that was proud and gentlemanly in him rebelled 
at the thought of creeping into another man’s house in the 
night. Modesty is doubtless a virtue, but it is a virtue respon- 
sible for many offenses. Had August not felt so distrustful 
of his own wisdom, nothing could have persuaded him to make 
his love for Julia Anderson seem criminal by an action so want- 
ing in dignity. But back of Jonas’s judgment was that of 
Andrew, whose weakness was Quixotism. He wanted to live 
and to have others live on the concert-pitch of romantic action. 
There was something of chivalry in the proposal of Jonas, a 
spice of adventure that made him approve it on. purely senti- 
mental grounds. 

The more August thought of it, and the nearer he was to 
its execution, the more did he dislike it. But I have often 


116 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


noticed that people of a rather quiet temperament, such as 
young Wehle’s, show vis inertia in both ways — not very easily 
moved, they are not easily checked when once in motion. 
August’s velocity was not usually great, his momentum was 
tremendous, and now that he had committed himself to the 
hands of Jonas Harrison and set out upon this enterprise, he 
was determined, in his quiet way, to go through to the end. 

Of course he understood the house, and having left the 
family in meeting, he had nothing to do but to scale one of the 
pillara of the front-porch. In those Arcadian days upper win- 
dows were hardly ever fastened, except when the house was 
deserted by all its inmates for days. Half-way up the post he 
was seized with a violent trembling. His position brought to 
him a confused memory of a text of Scripture : “ He that entereth 
not by the door . . . but climbeth up some other way, the 

same is a thief and a robber.” Bred under Moravian influence, 
he half-believed the text to be supematurally suggested to him. 
For a moment his purpose wavered, but the habit of going 
through with an undertaking took the place of his will, and he 
went on blindly, as Baker the Nile explorer did, “more like a 
donkey than like a man.” Once on the upper porch he hesitated 
again. To break into a man’s house in this way was unlawful. 
His conscience troubled him. In vain he reasoned that Mrs. 
Anderson’s despotism was morally wrong, and that this action 
was right as an offset to it. He knew that it was not right. 

I want to remark here that there are many situations in life 
in which a conscience is dreadfully in the way. There are 
people who go straight ahead to success — such as it is — with no 
embarrassments, no fire in the rear from any scruples. Some of 
these days I mean to write an essay on “ The Inconvenience of 


THE WROKG PEW. 


m 


having a Conscience,” in which I shall proceed to show that it 
costs more in the course of a year or two, than it would to keep 
a stableful of fast horses. Many a man could afford to drive 
Dexters and Flora Temples who would be ruined by a con- 
science. But I must not write the essay here, for I am keep- 
ing August out in the night air and his perplexity all this time. 

August Wehle had the habit, I think I have said, of going 
through with an enterprise. He had another habit, a very in- 
convenient habit doubtless, but a very manly one, of listening 
for the voice of his conscience. And I think that this habit 
would have even yet turned him back, as he had his hand on 
the window-sash, had it not been that while he stood there trying 
to find out just what was the decision of his conscience, he heard 
the voices of the returning family. There was no time to lose, 
there was no shelter on the porch, in a minute more they 
would be in sight. He must go ahead now, for retreat was cut 
off. He lifted the window and climbed into the room, lower- 
ing the sash gently behind him. As no one ever came into this 
room but Jonas, he felt safe enough. Jonas would plan a meet- 
ing after midnight in Cynthy Ann’s room, and in Cynthy Ann’s 
presence. 

In groping for a chair, August drew aside the curtain of the 
gable-window, hoping to get some light. Had Jonas taken to 
cultivating flowers in pots ? Here was a “ monthly ” rose on the 
window-seat ! Surely this was the room. He had occupied it 
during his stay in the house. But he did not know that Mrs. 
Anderson had changed the arrangement between his leaving and 
the coming of Jonas. He noticed that the curtains were not the 
same. He trembled from head to foot. He felt for the bureau, 
and recognized by various little articles, a pincushion, a tuck- 


118 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


comb, and the sun-bonnet hanging against the window-frame, 
that he was in Julia’s room. His first emotion was not alarm. It 
was awe, as pure and solemn as the high-priest may have felt in 
the holy place. Everything pertaining to Julia had a curious 
sacredness, and this room was a temple into which it was sacri* 
lege to intrude. But a more practical question took his attention 
soon. The family had come in below, except Jonas and Cynthy 
Ann — who had walked slowly, planning a meeting for August — 
and Mr. Samuel Anderson, who stood at the front-gate with 
a neighbor. August could hear his shrill voice discussing the 
seventh trumpet and the thousand three hundred and thirty and 
five days. It would not do to be discovered where he was. 
Beside the fright he would give to Julia, he shuddered at the 
thought of compromising her in such a way. To go back was 
to insure his exposure, for Samuel Anderson had not yet half- 
settled the question of the trumpets. Indeed it seemed to August 
that the world might come to an end before that conversation 
would. He heard Humphreys enter his room. He was now 
persuaded that the room formerly occupied by Julia must be 
Jonas’s, and he determined to get to it if he could. He felt 
like a villain already. He would have cheerfully gone to State’s- 
prison in preference to compromising Julia. At any rate, he 
started out of Julia’s room toward the one that was occupied by 
Jonas. It was the only road open, and but for an unexpected 
encounter he would have reached his hiding-place in safety, for 
the door was but fifteen feet away. 

In order to explain the events that follow, I must ask the 
reader to go back to Julia, and to events that had occurred two 
hours before. Hitherto she had walked to and from meeting 
and “singing” with Humphreys, as a matter of courtesy. On 


THE WRONG PEW. 


119 


the evening in question she had absolutely refused to walk with 
him. Her mother found that threats were as vain as coaxing. 
Even her threat of dying with heart-disease, then and there, 
killed hy her daughter’s disobedience, could not move Julia, 
who wouM not even speak with the “ spider.” Her mother 
took her into the sitting-room alone, and talked with her. 

“ So this is the way you trifle with gentlemen, is it ? Night 
before last you engaged yourself to Mr. Humphreys, now you 
won’t speak to him. To think that my daughter should prove 
a heartless flirt ! ” 

I am afraid that the unfilial thought came into Julia’s mind 
that nothing could have been more in the usual order of things 
than that the daughter of a coquette should be a flirt. 

“ You’ll kill me on the spot ; you certainly will.” Julia felt 
anxious, for her mother showed signs of going into hysterics. 
But she put her foot out and shook her head in a way that said 
that all her friends might die and all the world might go to 
pieces before she would yield. Mrs. Anderson had one forlorn 
hope. She determined to order that forward. Leaving Julia 
alone, she went to her husband. 

“ Samuel, if you *value my life go and speak to your daugh- 
ter. She’s got your own stubbornness of will in her. She is just 
like you; she will have her own way. I shall die.” And Mrs. 
Abigail Anderson sank into a chair with unmistakable symptoms 
of a hysterical attack. 

I am aware that I have so far let the reader hear not one 
word of Samuel Anderson’s conversation. He has played a 
rather insignificant part in the story. Nothing could be more 
comme il faut. Insignificance was his characteristic. It was not 
so much that be was small. It is not so bad a thing to be a 


120 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


little man. But to be little and insignificant also is bad. There 
is only one thing worse, which is to be big and insignificant. If 
one is little and insignificant, one may be overlooked, insignifi- 
cance and all. But if one is big and insignificant, it is to be an 
obtrusive cipher, a great lubber, not easily kept out of sight. 

Appealed to by his wife, Samuel Anderson prepared to assert 
his authority as the head of the family. He almost strutted into 
Julia’s presence. Julia had a real affection for her father, and 
nothing mortified her more than to see him acting as a puppet, 
moved by her mother, and yet vain enough to believe himself 
independent and supreme. She would have yielded almost any 
other point to have saved herself the mortification of seeing her 
father act the fool ; but now she had determined that she 
would die and let everybody else die rather than walk with 
a man whose nature seemed to her corrupt, and whose touch 
was pollution. I do not mean that she was able to make a dis- 
tinct inventory of her reasons for disliking him, or to analyze 
her feelings. She could not have told just why she had so 
deep and utter a repugnance to walking a quarter of a mile to 
the school-house in company with this man. She followed that 
strong instinct of truth and purity which is the surest guide. 

“ Julia, my daughter,” said Samuel Anderson, “ really you 
must yield to me as head of the house, and treat this gentleman 
politely. I thought you respected him, or loved him, and he told 
me that you had given consent to marry him, and had told him 
to ask my consent.” 

In saying this, the “ head of the house ” was seesawing him. 
self backward and forward in his squeaky boots, speaking in 
a pompous manner, and with an effort to swell an effeminate 
voice to a bass key, resulting in something between a croak 


THE WRONG PEW. 


121 



and a squeal. Julia sat down and cried in mortification and 
disgust. Mr. Anderson understood this to be acquiescence, and 
turned and went into the next room. 


JULIA SAT DOWN IN MORTIFICATION. 

“Mr. Humphreys, my daughter will be glad to ask your 
pardon. She is over her little pet ; lovers always have pets. 


THE END OE THE WORLD. 


m 

Even my wife and I have had our disagreements in our 
time. Julia will he glad to see you in the sitting-room.” 

Humphreys drew the draw-strings and set his face into 
its broadest and most parallelogrammatic smile, bowed to Mr. 
Anderson, and stepped into the hall. But when he reached the 
sitting-room door he wished he had staid away. Julia had heard 
his tread, and was standing again with her foot advanced. Her 
eyes were very black, and were drawn to a sharp focus. She 
had some of her mother’s fire, though happily none of her 
mother’s meanness. It is hard to say whether she spoke or hissed. 

“ Go away, you spider ! I hate you ! I told you I hated 
you, and you told people I loved you and was engaged to you. 
Go away! You detestable spider, you! I’ll die right here, but 
I will not go with you.” 

But the smirking Humphreys moved toward her, speaking 
soothingly, and assuring her that there was some mistake. Julia 
dashed past him into the parlor and laid hold of her father’s arm. 

“ Father, protect me from that — that — spider ! I hate him ! ” 

Mr. Anderson stood irresolute a moment and looked appeal- 
ingly to his wife for a signal. She solved the difficulty herself. 
On the whole she had concluded not to die of heart-disease 
until she saw Julia married to suit her taste, and having found 
a hill she could not go through, she went round. Seizing Julia’s 
arm with more of energy than affection, she walked off with her, 
or rather walked her off, in a sulky silence, while Mr. Anderson 
kept Humphreys company. 

I thought best to keep August standing in the door of Julia’s 
room all this time while I explained these things to you, so 
that you might understand what follows. In reality August did 
not stop at all, but walked out into the hall and into difficulty. 


THE ENCOUNTER. 


123 


CHAPTER XVIII, 


THE ENCOUNTER. 



UST before August came out of the door of 
Julia’s room he had heard Humphreys enter his 
room on the opposite side of the hall. Humphreys 
had lighted his cigar and was on his way to the 
porch to smoke off his discomfiture when he met Au- 
gust coming out of Julia’s door on the opposite side of the hall. 
The candle in Humphreys’s room threw its light full on August’s 
face, there was no escape from recognition, and Wehle was too 
proud to retreat. He shut the door of Julia’s room and stood 
with back against the wall staring at Humphreys, who did not 
forget to smile in his most aggravating way. 

“ Thief ! thief ! ” called Humphreys. 

In a moment Mrs. Anderson and Julia ran up the stairs, fol- 
lowed by Mr. Anderson, who hearing the outcry had left the 
matter of the Apocalypse unsettled, and by Jonas and Cynthy 
Ann, who had just arrived. 

“ I knew it,” cried Mrs. Anderson, turning on the mortified 
Julia, “ I never knew a Dutchman nor a foreigner of any son 


124 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


that wouldn’t steal. Now you see what you get by taking a 
fancy to a Dutchman. And now you see” — to her husband — 
“ what you get by taking a Dutchman into your house. I al- 
ways wanted you to hire white men and not Dutchmen nor 
thieves ! ” 

“ I beg your pardon, Mrs. Anderson,” said August, with very 
White lips, “ I am not a thief.” 

“ Not a thief, eh? What was he doing, Mr. Humphreys, when 
you first detected him?” 

“Coming out of Miss Anderson’s room,” said Humphreys, 
smiling politely. 

“ Do you invite gentlemen to your room ? ” said the frantic 
woman to Julia, meaning by one blow to revenge herself and 
crush the stubbornness of her daughter forever. But Julia was 
too anxious about August to notice the shameless insult. 

“Mrs. Anderson, this visit is without any invitation from 
Julia. I did wrong to enter your house in this way, but I only 
am responsible, and I meant to enter Jonas’s room. I did not 
know that Julia occupied this room. I am to blame, she is not.” 

“ And what did you break in for if you didn’t mean to steal? 
It is all off between you and Jule, for I saw your letter. I shall 
have you arrested to-morrow for burglary. And I think you 
ought to be searched. Mr. Humphreys, won’t you put him out? ” 

Humphreys stepped forward toward August, but he noticed 
that the latter had a hard look in his eyes, and had two stout 
German fists shut very tight. He turned back. 

“ These thieves are nearly always armed. I think I had best 
get a pistol out of my trunk.” 

“I have no arms, and you know it, coward,” said August. 
“ I will not be put out by anybody, but I will go out whenever 



















“ GOOD-BY !” 


THE ENCOUNTER. 


127 


the master of this house asks me to go out, and the rest of you 
open a free path.” 

“ Jonas, put him out ! ” screamyd Mrs. Anderson. 

“ Couldn’t do it,” said Jonas “ couldn’t do it ef I tried. 
They’s too much bone and sinnoo in them arms of his’n, and 
moreover he’s a gentleman. I axed him to come and see me 
sometime, and he come. He come ruther late it’s true, but I 
s’pose he thought that sence we got sech a dee-splay of watch- 
seals and straps we had all got so stuck up, we wouldn’t receive 
calls afore fashionable hours. Any way, I ’low he didn’t mcaD 
no harm, and he’s my visitor, seein’ he meant to come into my 
winder, knowin’ the door was closed agin him. And he won’t 
let no man put him out, ’thout he’s a man with more’n half a 
dozen watch-seals onto him, to give him weight and influence.” 

“ Samuel, will you see me insulted in this way? Will you put 
this burglar out of the house ? ” 

The “ head of the house,” thus appealed to, tried to look im- 
portant ; he tried to swell up his size and his courage. But he 
did not dare touch August. 

“ Mr. Anderson, I beg your pardon. I had no right to come 
in as I did. I had no right so to enter a gentleman’s house. If 
I had not known that this cowardly fop— I don’t know what 
else he may be — was injuring me by his lies I should not have 
come in. If it is a crime to love a young lady, then I have 
committed a crime. You have only to exercise your authority 
as master of this house and ask me to go.” 

“I do ask you to go, Mr. Wehle.” 

It was the first time that Samuel Anderson had ever called 
him Mr. Wehle. It was an involuntary tribute to the dignity of 
the young man, as he stood at bay. 


128 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“Mr. Wehle, indeed /” said Mrs. Anderson. 

August had hoped Julia would say a word in his behalf. JBut 
she was too much cowed by her mother’s fierce passion. So like 
a criminal going to prison, like a man going to his own funeral, 
August Wehle went down the hall toward the stairs, which 
were at the back of it. Humphreys instinctively retreated intc 
his room. Mrs. Anderson glared on the young man as he went 
by, but he did not turn his head even when he passed Julia. 
His heart and hope were ail gone ; in his mortification and 
defeat there seemed to him nothing left but his unbroken 
pride to sustain him. He had descended two or three steps, 
when Julia suddenly glided forward and said with a tremulous 
voice “You aren’t going without telling me good-by, August?” 

“ Jule Anderson ! what do you mean ? ” cried her mother. 
But the hall was narrow by the stairway, and Jonas, by standing 
close to Cynthy Ann, in an unconscious sort of a way managed 
to keep Mrs. Anderson back; else she would have laid violent 
hands on her daughter. 

When August lifted his eyes and saw her face full of tender- 
ness and her hand reached over the balusters to him, he seemed 
to have been suddenly lifted from perdition to bliss. The tears 
ran unrestrained upon his cheeks, he reached up and took her 
hand. 

“ Good-by, Jule ! God bless you ! ” he said huskily, and went 
out into the night, happy in spite of all. 


THE MOTHER. 


129 


CHAPTER XIX. 

THE MOTHER. 


of the door he went, happy in spite of all 
the mistakes he had made and of all the contre- 
temps of his provoking misadventure; happy in 
spite of the threat of arrest for burglary. For 
nearly a minute August Wehle was happy in that 
perfect way in which people of quiet tempers are happy — happy 
without fluster. But before he had passed the gate, he heard 
a scream and a wild hysterical laugh ; he heard a hurrying of 
feet and saw a moving of lights. He would fain have turned 
back to find out what the matter was, he had so much of inter- 
est in that house, but he remembered that he had been turned 
out and that he could not go back. The feeling of outlawry 
mingled its bitterness with the feeling of anxiety. He feared 
that something had happened to Julia ; he lingered and listened. 
Humphreys came out upon the upper porch and looked sharply 
up and down the road. August felt instinctively that he was the 
object of search and slunk into a fence-comer, remembering 
that he was now a burglar and at the mercy of the man whose 
face was enough to show him unrelenting. 




130 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Presently Humphreys turned and went in, and then August 
came out of the shadow and hurried away. When he had gone a 
mile, he heard the hoofs of horses, and again he concealed himself 
with a cowardly feeling he had never known before. But when 
he found that it was Jonas, riding one horse and leading another, 
on his way to bring Dr. Ketchup, the steam-doctor, he ran out 

“Jonas! Jonas! what’s the matter? Who’s sick? Is it 
Julia?” 

“ I’ll be bound you ax fer Jule first, my much-respected 
comrade. But it’s only one of the ole woman’s conniption fits, 
and you know she’s got nineteen lives. People of the catamount 
sort always has. You’d better gin a thought to yourself now. 
I got you into this scrape, and I mean to see you out, as the dog 
said to the ’possum in its hole. Git up onto this four-legged 
quadruped and go as fur as I go on the road to peace and safety. 
Now, I tell you what, the hawk’s got a mighty good purchase 
onto you, my chicken, and he’s jest about to light, and when he 
lights, look out fer feathers ! Don’t sleep under the paternal 
shingles, as they sa; . Go to Andrew’s castle, and he’ll help you 
git acrost the river into the glorious State of ole Kaintuck afore 
any warrant can be got out fer takin’ you up. Never once thought 
of your bein’ took up. But don’t delay, as the preachers say. 
The time is short, and the human heart is desperately wicked and 
mighty deceitful and onsartain.” 

As far as Jonas traveled his way, he carried August upon the 
gray horse. Then the latter hurried across the fields to his 
father’s cabin. Little Wilhelmina sat with face against the 
window waiting his return. 

“ Where did you go, August ? Did you see the pretty girl 
at Anderson’s?” 


THE MOTHER. 


131 


He stooped and kissed her, but, without speaking a word to 
her, he went over to where his mother sat darning the last of 



the mother’s blessing. 


her basket of stockings. All the rest were asleep, and having 
assured himself of this, he drew up a low chair and leaned his 



132 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


elbow on his knee and his head on his hand, and told the whole 
adventure of the evening to his mother, and then dropped his 
head on her lap and wept in a still way. And the sweet- 
eyed, weary Moravian mother laid her two hands upon his head 
and prayed. And Wilhelmina knelt instinctively by the side 
of her brother. 

Perhaps there is no God. Or perhaps He is so great that 
our praying has no effect. Perhaps this strong crying of our 
hearts to Him in our extremity is no witness of his readiness 
to hear. Let him live in doubt who can. Let me believe that 
the tender mother-heart and the loving sister-heart in that little 
cabin did reach up to the great Heart that is over us all in 
Fatherly love, did find a real comfort for themselves, and did 
bring a strength-giving and sanctifying something upon the head 
of the young man, who straightway rose up refreshed, and 
departed out into the night, leaving behind him mother and 
sister straining their eyes after him in the blackness, and car- 
rying with him thoughts and memories, and — who shall doubt? 
— a genuine heavenly inspiration that saved him in the trials in 
which we shall next meet him. 

At two o’clock that night August Wehle stood upon the shore 
of the Ohio in company with Andrew Anderson, the Backwoods 
Philosopher. Andrew waved a fire-brand at the steamboat 
“ Isaac Shelby,” which was coming round the bend. And the 
captain tapped his bell three times and stopped his engines. 
Then the yawl took the two men aboard, and two days after- 
ward Andrew came back alone. 


THE STEAM-DOCTOR. 


133 


CHAPTER XX. 

THE STEAM-DOCTOR. 



' O return to the house of Samuel Anderson. 

Scarcely had August passed out the door when 
Mrs. Anderson fell into a fit of hysterics, and de- 
clared that she was dying of heart-disease. Her time 
had come at last ! She was murdered ! Murdered 
by her own daughter’s ingratitude and disobedience ! Struck 
down in her own house ! And what grieved her most was that 
she should never live to see the end of the world! 

And indeed she seemed to be dying. Nothing is more fright- 
ful than a good solid* fit of hysterics. Cynthy Ann, inwardly 
condemning herself as she always did, lifted the convulsed pa- 
tient, who seemed to be anywhere in her last ten breaths, and 
carried her, with Mr. Anderson’s aid, down to her room, and 
while Jonas saddled the horse, Mr. Anderson put on his hat and 
prepared to go for the doctor. 

“Samuel! O Sam-u-el! Oh-h-h-h-h!” cried Mrs. Anderson, 


with rising and falling inflections that even patient Dr. Rush 
could never have analyzed, laughing insanely and weeping pite- 
ously in the same breath, in the same word ; running it up and 


134 


the bind of the world. 


down the gamut in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable way ; now 
whooping like a savage, and now sobbing like the last breath 
of a broken-hearted. “ Samuel ! Sam-u-el ! O Samuel ! Ha ! 



“corn-sweats and caiamus.” 

ha! ha! h-a-a! Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h ! You won’t leave me to die 
alone ! After the wife I’ve been to you, you won’t leave me to 
die alone ! No-o-o-o-o! Hoo-hoo-oo-00 ! You musn’t. You 
shan’t. Send Jonas, and you stay by me! T hink ” here 


THE STEAM-DOCTOR. 


135 


her breath died away, and for a moment she seemed really to 
be dying. “Think,” she gasped, and then sank away again. 
After a minute she opened her eyes, and, with characteristic 
pertinacity, took up the sentence just where she had left off. 
She had carefully kept her place throughout the period of un- 
consciousness. But now she spoke, not with a gasp, but in that 
shrill, unnatural falsetto so characteristic of hysteria ; that voice 
— half yell — that makes every nerve of the listener jangle with 
the discord. “ Think, oh-h-h Samuel ! why won’t you think 
what a wife I’ve been to you ? Here I’ve drudged and scrubbed 
and scrubbed and drudged all these years like a faithful and 
industrious wife, never neglecting my duty. And now — oh-h-h-h 

— now to be left alone in my ” Here she ceased to breathe 

again for a while. “ In my last hours to die, to die ! to die with, 
out — without — Oh-h-h l” What Mrs. Anderson was left to die 
without she never stated. Mr. Anderson had beckoned to Jonas 
when he came in, and that worthy had gone off in a leisurely 
trot to get the “steam-doctor.” 

Dr. Ketchup had been a blacksmith, but hard work disagreed 
with his constitution. He felt that he was made for something 
better than shoeing horses. This ambitious thought was first 
suggested to him by the increasing portliness of his person, 
which, while it made stooping over a horse’s hoof inconvenient, 
also impressed him with the fact that his aldermanic figure would 
really adorn a learned profession. So he bought one of those 
little hand-books which the founder of the Thomsonian system 
sold dirt-cheap at twenty dollars apiece, and which told how 
to cure or kill in every case. The owners of these important 
treasures of invaluable information were under bonds not to 
disclose the profound secrets therein contained, the fathomless 


136 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


wisdom which taught them how to decide in any given case 
whether ginseng or a corn-sweat was the required remedy. 
And the invested twenty dollars had brought the shrewd 
blacksmith a handsome return. 

“Hello!” said Jonas in true Western style, as he reined up 
in front of Dr. Ketchup’s house in the outskirts of Brayville. 
“Hello the house!” But Dr. Ketchup was already asleep. 
“ Takes a mighty long time to wake up a fat man,” soliloquized 
Jonas. “ He gits so used to hearin’ hisself snore that he can’t 
tell the difference ’twixt snorin’ and thunder. Hello ! Hello the 
house! I say, hello the blacksmith-shop! Dr. Ketchup, why 
don’t you git up? Hello! Corn-sweats and calamus! Hello! 
Whoop ! Hurrah for Jackson and Dr. Ketchup ! Hello ! 
Thunderation ! Stop thief ! Fire ! Fire ! Fire ! Murder ! Mur- 
der ! Help ! Help ! Hurrah ! Treed the coon at last ! ” 

This last exclamation greeted the appearance of Dr, Ketch- 
up’s head at the window. 

“ Are you drunk, Jonas Harrison ? Go ’way with your 
hollering, or I’ll have you took up,” said Ketchup. 

“You’ll find that tougher work than making horseshoes any 
day, my respectable friend and feller-citizen. I’ll have you took 
up fer sleeping so sound and snorin’ so loud as to disturb all 
creation and the rest of your neighbors. I’ve heard you ever 
sence I left Anderson’s, and thought ’twas a steamboat. Come, 
my friend, git on your clothes and accouterments, fer Mrs. An . 
derson is a-dyin’ or a-lettin’ on to be a-dyin’ fer a drink of gin- 
seng-tea or a corn-sweat or some other decoction of the healin’ 
art. Come, I fotch two hosses, so you shouldn’t lose no time a 
saddlin’ your’n, though I don’t doubt the ole woman’d git well 
ef you never gin her the light of your cheerful count’nance. 







THE STEAM-DOCTOR. 


130 


She’d git well fer spite, and hire a calomel-doctor jist to make 
you mad. I’d jest as soon and a little sooner expect a female 
wasp to die of heart-disease as her.” 

The head of Dr. Ketchup had disappeared from the window 
about the middle of this speech, and the remainder of it came by 
sheer force of internal pressure, like the flowing of an artesian well. 

Dr. Ketchup walked out, with ruffled dignity, carefully 
dressed. His immaculate clothes and his solemn face were 
the two halves of his stock in trade. Under the clothes lay 
buried Ketchup the blacksmith ; under the wiseacre face was 
Ketchup the ignoramus. Ignoramus he was, but not a fool. As 
he rode along back with Jonas, he plied the latter with ques- 
tions. If he could get the facts of the case out of Jonas, he 
would pretend to have inferred them from the symptoms and 
thus add to his credit. 

“What caused this attack, Jonas?” 

“ I ’low she caused it herself. Generally does, my friend,” 
said Jonas. 

“ Had anything occurred to excite her? ” 

“Well, yes, I ’low they had; consid’able, if not more.” 

“ What was it ? ” 

“ Well, you see she’d been to Hankins’s preachin’. Now, I 
’low, my medical friend, the day of jedgment a’n’t a pleasin’ 
prospeck to anybody that’s jilted one brother to marry another, 
and then cheated the jilted one outen his sheer of his lamented 
father’s estate. Do you think it is, my learned friend?” 

But Dr. Ketchup could not be sure whether Jonas was making 
game of him or not. So he changed the subject. 

“ Nice hoss, this bay,” said the “ doctor.” 

“ Well, yes,” said Jonas, “ I don’t ’low you ever put shoes on 


140 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


no better hoss than this ’ere in all your days — as a blacksmith, 
Did you now, my medical friend?” 

“ No, I think not,” said Ketchup testily, and was silent. 

Mrs. Anderson had grown impatient at the doctor’s delay. 
“Samuel! Oo! oo! oo! Samuel! My dear, I’m dying. Jonas 
don’t care. He wouldn’t hurry. I wonder you trusted him ! 
If you had been dying, I should have gone myself for the doctor. 
Oo! oo ! oo ! oh! If I should die, nobody would be sorry.” 

Abigail Anderson was not to blame for telling the truth so 
exactly in this last sentence. It was an accident. She might 
have recalled it but that Dr. Ketchup walked in at that moment. 

He felt her pulse ; looked at h?r tongue ; said that it was 
heart-disease, caused by excitement. He thought it must be 
religious excitement. She should have a corn-sweat and some 
wafer-ash tea. The corn-sweat would act as a tonic and strength- 
en the pericardium. The wafer-ash would cause a tendency of 
blood to the head, and thus relieve the pressure on the juggler- 
vein. Cynthy Ann listened admiringly to Dr. Ketchup’s incom- 
prehensible, oracular utterances, and then speedily put a bushel 
of ear-corn in the great wash-boiler, which was already full of 
hot water in expectation of such a prescription, and set the 
wafer-ash to draw. 

Julia had, up to this time, stood outside her mother’s door 
trembling with fear, and not daring to enter. She longed to do 
something, but did not know how it would be received. Now, 
while the deep, sonorous voice of Ketchup occupied the attention 
of all, she crept in and stood at the foot of Mrs. Anderson’s bed. 
The mother, recovering from her twentieth dying spell, saw her. 

“ Take her away ! She has killed me f She wants me to 
die ! I know ! Take her away ! ” 


THE STEAM-DOCTOR. 


141 


And Julia went to her own room and shut herself up in dark- 
ness and in wretchedness, but in all that miserable night there 
came to her not one regret that she had reached her hand to the 
departing August. 

The neighbor-women came in and pretended to do some- 
thing for the invalid, but really they sat by the kitchen-stove 
and pumped Cynthy Ann and the doctor, and managed in some 
way to connect Julia with her mother’s illness, and shook their 
heads. So that when Julia crept down-stairs at midnight, in hope 
of being useful, she found herself looked at inquisitively, and felt 
herself to be such an object of attention that she was glad to 
take the advice of Cynthy Ann and find refuge her own 
room. On the stairs she met Jonas, who said as she passed : 

“ Don’t fret yourself, little turtle-dove. Don’t pay no ’ten- 
tion to ole Ketchup. Your ma won’t die, not even with his corn- 
sweats to waft her on to glory. You done your duty to-night 
like one of Fox’s martyrs, and like George Washi’ton with his 
little cherry-tree and hatchet. And you’ll git your reward, if 
not in the next world, you’ll have it in this.” 

Julia lay down awhile, and then sat up, looking out into the 
darkness. Perhaps God was angry with her for loving August ; 
perhaps she was making an idol of him. When Julia came to 
think that her love for August was in antagonism to the love 
of God, she did not hesitate which she would choose. All the best 
of her nature was loyal to August, whom she “had seen,” as 
the Apostle John has it. She could not reason it out, but a 
God who seemed to be in opposition to the purest and best emo- 
tion of her heart was a God she could not love. August and 
the love of August were known quantities. God and the love of 
God were unknown, and the God of whom Cynthy spoke (and 


142 


THE END OF THE WOULD. 


of whom many a mistaken preacher has spoken), that was jeal- 
ous of Mrs. Pearson’s love for her baby, and that killed it be- 
cause it was his rival, was not a God that she could love with- 
out being a traitor to all the good that God had put in her heart. 
The God that was keeping August away from her because he 
was jealous of the one beautiful thing in her life was a Mo- 
loch, and she deliberately determined that she would not wor- 
ship or love him. The True God, who is a Father, and who is 
not Supreme Selfishness, doing all for His own glory, as men 
falsely declare ; the True God — -who does all things for the good 
of others — loved her, I doubt not, fcr refusing to worship the 
Conventional Deity thus presented to her mind. Even as He has 
pitied many a mother that rebelled against the Governor of the 
Universe, because she was told the Governor of the Universe, in 
a petty seeking for his own glory, had taken away her “ idols.” 

But Julia looked up at the depths between the stars, and felt 
how great God must be, and her rebellion against Him seemed 
a war at fearful odds. And then the sense of God’s omnipres- 
ence, of His being there alone with her, so startled her and awak- 
ened such a feeling of her fearful loneliness, orphanage, antago- 
nism to God, that she could bear it no longer, and at two o’clock 
she went down again ; but Mrs. Brown looked over at Mrs. Or- 
cutt in a way that said : “ Told you so ! Guilty conscience ! 
Can’t sleep 1” And so Julia thought God, even as she con- 
ceived Him, better company than men, or rather than women, 

for well, I won’t make the ungallant remark ; each sex has its 

besetting faults. 

Julia took back with her a candle, thinking that this awful 
God would not seem so close if she had a light. There lay on 
her bureau a Testament, one of those old editions of the Amer* 


THE STEAM-DOCTOR. 


143 


ican Bible Society, printed on indifferent paper, and bound in 
u red muslin that was given to fading, the like whereof in book- 
making has never been seen since. She felt angry with God, 
who, she was sure, was persecuting her, as Cynthy Ann had 
said, out of jealousy of her love for August, and she was deter- 
mined that she would not look into that red-cloth Testament, 
which seemed to her full of condemnation. But there was a 
fascination about it she could not resist. The discordant hys- 
terical laughter of her mother, which reached her ears from 
below, harrowed her sorely, and her grief and despair at her 
own situation were so great that she was at last fain to read 
the only book in the room in order that she might occupy 
her mind. There is a strange superstition among certain pietists 
which leads them to pray for a text to guide them, and then take 
any chance passage as a divine direction. I do not mean to 
say that Julia had any supernatural leading in her reading. 
The New Testament is so full of comfort that one could hardly 
manage to miss it. She read the seventh chapter of Luke : 
how the Lord healed the centurion’s servant that was “ dear 
unto him,” and noted that He did not rebuke the man for loving 
his slave ; how the Lord took pity on that ooor widow who 
wept at the bier of her only son, and brought him back to life 
v.gain, and “ restored him to his mother. ” This did not seem to 
be just the Christ that Cynthy Ann thought of as the foe of 
every human affection. She read more that she did not under- 
stand so well, and then at the end of the chapter she read about 
the woman that was a sinner, that washed His feet with grate- 
ful tears and wiped them with her hair. And she would have 
taken the woman’s guilt to have had the woman’s opportunity 
and her benediction. 


144 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


At last, turning over the leaves without any definite purpose, 
she lighted on a place in Matthew, where three verses at the 
end of a chapter happened to stand at the head of a column. I 
suppose she read them because the beginning of the page and 
the end of the chapter made them seem a short detached piece. 
And they melted into her mood so that she seemed to know 
Christ and God for the first time. “ Come unto me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden,” she read, and stopped. That means 
me, she thought with a heart ready to burst. And that saying is 
the gateway of life. When the promises and injunctions mean 
me, I am saved. Julia read on, “And I will give you rest.” 
And so she drank in the passage, clause by clause, until she 
came to the end about an easy yoke and a light burden, and 
then God seemed to her so different. She prayed for August, 
for now the two loves, the love for August and the love for 
Christ, seemed not in any way inconsistent. She lay down 
saying over and over, with tears in her eyes, “rest for your 
souls,” and “ weary and heavy laden,” and “ come unto me,” and 
“meek and lowly of heart,” and then she settled on one word 
and repeated it over and over, “ rest, rest, rest.” The old feel- 
ing was gone. She was no more a rebel nor an orphan. The 
presence of God was not a terror but a benediction. She had 
found rest for her soul, and He gave His beloved sleep. For 
when she awoke from what seemed a short slumber, the red 
light of a glorious dawn came in at the window, and her candle 
was flickering its last in the bottom of the socket. The Testa- 
ment lay open as she had left it, and for days she kept it open 
there, and did not dare read anything but these three verses, lest 
she should lose the rest for her soul that she found here. 


THE HAWK IN A NEW PART, 


145 


CHAPTER XXI. 

THE HAWK IN A NEW PART. 

UMPHREYS was now in the last weeks of his 
® singing-school. He had become a devout Miller- 
ite, and was paying attentions to the not unwill- 
ing Betsey Malcolm, though pretending at Ander- 
^ son’s to be absolutely heart-broken at the conduct of 

Julia in jilting him after she had given him every assurance of 
affection. And then to be jilted for a Dutchman, you know ! 
In this last regard his feeling was not all affectation. In his 
soul, cupidity, vanity, and vindictiveness divided the narrow 
territory between them. He inwardly swore that he’d get satis- 
faction somehow. Debts which were due to his pride should 
be collected by his revenge. 

Did you ever reflect on the uselessness of a landscape when 
one has no eyes to see it with, or, what is worse, no soul to look 
through one’s eyes ? Humphreys was going down to the castle 
to call on the Philosopher, and “Shady Hollow,” as Andrew 
called it, had surely never been more glorious than on the morn- 
ing which he chose for his walk. The black-haw bushes hung 
over the roadside, the maples lifted up their great trunk-pillars 


146 


THE END OF THE WOELD. 


toward the sky, and the grape-vines, some of them four and even 
six inches in diameter, reached up to the high houghs, fifty or a 
hundred feet, without touching the trunk. They had been car- 
ried up by the growth of the tree, tree and vine having always 
lived in each other’s embrace. Out through the opening in the 
hollow, Humphreys saw the green sea of six-feet-high Indian 
corn in the fertile bottoms, the two rows of sycamores on the 
sandy edges of the river, and the hazy hills on the Kentucky side. 
But not one touch of sentiment, not a perception of beauty, entered 
the soul of the singing-master as he daintily chose hi3 steps so as 
to avoid soiling his glossy boots, and as he knocked the leaves off 
the low-hanging beech boughs with his delicate cane. He had 
his purpose in visiting Andrew, and his mind was bent on 
his game. 

Charon, the guardian of the castle, bayed his great hoarse 
bark at the Hawk, and with that keen insight into human nature 
for which dogs are so remarkable, he absolutely forbade the 
dandy’s entrance, until Andrew appeared at the door and called 
the dog away. 

“ I am delighted at having the opportunity of meeting a great 
light in literature like yourself, Mr. Anderson. Here you sit 
weaving, earning your bread with a manly simplicity that is 
truly admirable. You are like Cincinnatus at his plow. I also 
am a literary man.” 

He really was a college graduate, though doubtless he was as 
much of a humbug in recitations and examinations as he had 
always been since. Andrew’s only reply to his assertion that 
he was a literary man was a rather severe and prolonged scrutiny 
of his oily locks, his dainty mustache, his breast-pin, his watch- 
seals, and finally his straps and his boots. For Andrew firmly 




THE HAWK IN A NEW PAET. 147 

believed that neglected hair, Byron collars, and unblackencd 
boots were the first signs of literary taste. 

“ You think I dress too well,” said Humphreys with his 
ghastly smirk. “ You think that I care too much for appear- 
ances. I do. It is a weakness of mine which comes from a 
residence abroad.” 

These words touched the Philosopher a little. To have been 
abroad was the next best thing to having been a foreigner ab 
origine. But still he felt a little suspicious. He was superior 
to the popular prejudice against the mustache, but he could not 
endure hair-oil. “ Nature,” he maintained, “ made the whole 
beard to be worn, and Nature provides an oil for the hair. Let 
Nature have her way.” He was suspicious of Humphreys, not 
because he wore a mustache, but because he shaved the rest of 
his face and greased his hair. He had, besides, a little intui- 
tive perception of the fact that a smile which breaks against the 
rock-bound coast of cold cheek-bones and immovable eyes is a 
mask. And so he determined to test the literary man. I have 
heard that Masonic lodges have been deceived by impostors. I 
have never heard that a literary man was made to believe in 
the genuineness of the attainments of a charlatan. 

And yet Humphreys held his own well. He could talk glibly 
and superficially about books ; he simulated considerable enthu 
siasm for the books which Andrew admired. His mistake and 
his consequent overthrow came, as always in such cases, from 
a desire to overdo. It was after half an hour of talking without 
tripping that Andrew suddenly asked : “ Do you like the ever- 
to-be-admired Xenophanes?” 

It certainly is no disgrace to any literary man not to know 
anything of so remote a philosopher as Xenophanes. The first 


148 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


characteristic of a genuine literary man is the frankness with 
which he confesses his ignorance. But Humphreys did not really 
know but that Xenophanes was part of the daily reading of a 
man of letters. 

“ Oh ! yes,” said he. “ I have his works in turkey morocco.” 

“What do you think of his opinion that God is a sphere ? ” 
asked the Philosopher, smiling. 

“ Oh ! yes — ahem ; let me see — which God is it that he speaks 
of, Jupiter or — well, you know he was a Greek.” 

“ But he only believed in one God,” said Andrew sternly. 

“ Oh I ah ! I forgot that he was a Christian.” 

So from blunder to blunder Andrew pushed him, Humphreys 
stumbling more and more in his blind attempts to right himself, 
and leaving, at last, with much internal confusion but with an un- 
ruffled smile. He dared not broach his errand by asking the 
address of August. For Andrew did not conceal his disgust, 
having resumed work at his loom, suffering the bowing impostor 
to find his own way out without so much as a courteous adieu. 


JONAS EXPRESSES HIS OPINION ON DUTCHMEN. 149 


CHAPTER XXII. 

JONAS EXPRESSES HIS OPINION ON DUTCHMEN. 



' OMETIMES the virus of a family is all drawn off 
in one vial. I think it is Emerson who makes 
this remark. We have all seen the vials. 

Such an one was Norman Anderson. The curious 
law of hereditary descent had somehow worked him 
only evil. “ Nater,” observed Jonas to Cynthy, when the latter 
had announced to him that Norman, on account of some dis- 
grace at school, had returned home, “ nater ha’n’t done him 
half jestice, I Tow. It went through Sam’el Anderson and 
Abig’il, and picked out the leetle weak pompous things in 
the illustrious father, and then hunted out all the spiteful and 
hateful things in the lovin’ and much-esteemed mother, and 
Bomehow stuck ’em together, to make as ornery a chap as ever 
bit a hoe-cake in two.” 

“I’m afeard her brother’s scrape and cornin’ home won’t 
make Jule none the peacefuler at the present time,” said Cynthy 
Ann. 


“ Wal,” returned Jonas, “ I don’t think she keers much fer 
him. She couldn’t, you know. Love him? Now, Cynthy 
Ann, my dear”— here Cynthy Ann began to reproach herself 


150 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


for listening to anything so pleasant as these two last words— 
“ Now, Cynthy Ann, my dear, you see you might maybe love 
a cuckle-burr and nuss it ; hut I don’t think you would be 
likely to. I never heern tell of nobody carryin’ jimson-weed 
pods in their bosoms. You see they a’n’t no place about Nor- 
man Anderson that love could take a holt of ’thout gittin’ 
scratched.” 

“ But his mother loves him, I reckon,” said Cynthy Ann. 

“ Wal, yes ; so she do. Loves her shadder in the lookin’-glass, 
maybe, and kinder loves Norman bekase he’s got so much of 
her devil into him. It’s like lovin’ like, I reckon. But I ’low 
they’s a right smart difference with Jule. Sence she was born, 
that Norman has took more delight in tormentin’ Jule than a 
yaller dog with a white tail does in worryin’ a brindle tom-cat up 
a peach-tree. And cornin’ home at this junction he’ll gin her a 
all-fired lot of trials and tribulation.” 

At the time this conversation took place, two weeks had 
elapsed since Mrs. Anderson’s “ attack.” Julia had heard noth- 
ing from August yet. The “ Hawk ” still made his head-quar- 
ters in the house, but was now watching another quarry. Mrs. 
Anderson was able to scold as vigorously as ever, if, indeed, that 
function had ever been suspended. And just now she was en- 
gaged in scolding the teacher who had expelled Norman. The 
habit of fighting teachers was as chronic as her heart-disease. 
Norman had always been abused by the whole race of peda- 
gogues. There was from the first a conspiracy against him, and 
now he was cheated out of his last chance of getting an educa- 
tion. All this Norman steadfastly believed. 

Of course Norman sided with his mother as against the 
Dutchman, The more contemptible a man is, the more he eon- 


JONAS EXPRESSES IIIS OPINION ON DUTCHMEN. 151 


temns a man for not belonging to his race or nation. And Nor- 
man felt that he would be eternally disgraced by any alliance 
with a German. He threw himself into the fight with a great 
deal of vigor. It helped him to forget other things. 

“ Jule,” said he, walking up to her as she sat alone on the 
porch, “ I’m ashamed of you. To go and fall in love with a 
Dutchman like Gus Wehle, and disgrace us all!” 

“ I wonder you didn’t think about disgrace before,” retorted 



NORMAN ANDERSON. 


Julia. “I am ashamed to have August Wehle hear what you’ve 
been doing.” 

Dogs that have the most practice in cat-worrying are liable 
to get their noses scratched sometimes. Norman took care nevei 
to attack Julia again except under the guns of his mother’s power 
fnl battery. And he revenged himself on her by appealing to 


152 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


his mother with a complaint that “ Jule had throwed up to him 
that he had been dismissed from school.” And of course Julia 
received a solemn lecture on her way of driving poor Norman to 
destruction. She was determined to disgrace the family. If she 
couid not do it by marrying a Dutchman, she would do it by slan- 
dering her brother. 

Norman thought to find an ally in Jonas. 

“Jonas, don’t you think it’s awful that Jule is in love with 
a Dutchman like Gus Wehle ? ” 

“ I do, my love,” responded Jonas. “ I think a Dutchman 
is a Dutchman. I don’t keer how much he larns by burnin’. 
the midnight ile by day and night. My time-honored friend 
he’s a Dutchman arter all. The Dutch is bred in the bone. It 
won’t fade. A Dutchman may be a gentleman in his way of 
doin’ things, may be honest and industrious, and keep all the 
commandments in the catalogue, but I say he is Dutch, and 
that’s enough to keep him out of the kingdom of heaven and 
out of this free and enlightened republic. And an American 
may be a good-fer-nothin’, omery little pertater-ball, wuthless 
alike to man and beast ; he mayn’t be good fer nothin’, nuther fer 
work nur study ; he may git drunk and git turned outen school 
and do any pertikeler number of disgraceful and oncreditable 
things, he may be a reg’ler milksop and nincompoop, a fool 
and a blackguard and a coward all rolled up into one piece of 
brown paper, ef he wants to. And what’s to hender ? A’n’t he a 
free-born an’ enlightened citizen of this glorious and civilized 
and Christian land of Hail Columby ? What business has a 
Dutchman, ef he’s ever so smart and honest and lamed, got 
in our broad domains, resarved for civil and religious liberty? 
What business has he got breathin’ our atmosphere or takin* 


JONAS EXPRESSES HIS OPINION ON DUTCHMEN. 1T)3 


refuge under the feathers of our American turkey-buzzard ? No, 
my beloved and respected feller-citizen of native birth, it’s as 
plain to me as the wheels of ’Zek’el and the year 1843. I say, 
Hip, hip, hoo-ray fer liberty or death, and down with the 
Dutch ! ” 

Norman Anderson scratched his head. 

What did Jonas mean? 

He couldn’t exactly divine ; but it is safe to say that on the 
whole he was not entirely satisfied with this boomerang speech. 
He rather thought that he had better not depend on Jonas. 

But he was not long in finding allies enough in his war 
against Germany. 


154 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

SOMETHIN’ LUDIKEROUS. 


HERE was an egg-supper in the country store at 
Brayville. Mr. Mandluff, the tall and rawboned 
Hoosier who kept the store, was not unwilling to 
have the boys get up an egg supper now and then in 
his store after he had closed the front-door at night. 
For you must know that an egg-supper is a peculiar Western 
institution. Sometimes it is a most enjoyable institution — when 
it has its place in a store where there is no Kentucky whisky 
to be had. But in Brayville, in the rather miscellaneous estab- 
lishment of the not very handsome and not very graceful Mf. 
Mandluff, an egg-supper was not a great moral institution. K 
was otherwise, and profanely called by its votaries a camp- 
meeting ; it would be hard to tell why, unless it was that some of 
the insiders grew very happy before it was over. For an egg- 
supper at Mandluff’s store was to Brayville what an oyster- 
supper at Delmonico’s is to Naw York. It was one tenth hard 
eggs and nine tenths that beverage which bears the name of an 
old royal house of France. 

How were the eggs cooked? I knew somebody would ask 
that impertinent question. Well, they were not fried, they were 


SOMETHIN’ LTTDiKEROtfS. 


155 


not boiled, they were not poached, they were not scrambled, they 
were not omeletted, they were not roasted on the half-shell, 
they were not stuffed with garlic and served with cranberries, 
they were not boiled and served with anchovy sauce, they were 
not “ en salmi” I think I had better stop there, lest I betray 
my knowledge of cookery. It is sufficient to say that they were 
not cooked in any of the above-named fashions, nor in any other 
way mentioned in Catharine Beecher’s or Marion Harland’s cook- 
books. They were baked a la mode backwoods. It is hardly 
proper for me to give a recipe in this place, that belongs more 
properly to the “ Household Departments ” of the newspapers. 
But to satisfy curiosity, and to tell something about cooking, 
which Prof. Blot does not know, I may say that they were broken 
and dropped on a piece of brown paper laid on the top of the old 
box-stove. By the time the egg was cooked hard the paper was 
burned to ashes, but the egg came off clean and nice from the 
stove, and made as palatable and indigestible an article for a late 
supper as one could wish. It only wanted the addition of Mand- 
lufFs peculiar whisky to make it dissipation of the choicest 
kind. For the more a dissipation costs in life and health, the 
more fascinating it is. 

There was an egg-supper, as I said, at Mandluffs store. There 
was to be a “camp-meeting” in honor of Norman Anderson’s 
successful return to his liberty and his cronies. It gave Norman 
the greatest pleasure to return to a society where it was rather 
to his credit than otherwise that he had gone on a big old time, 
got caught, and been sent adrift by the old hunk that had tried 
to make him study Latin. 

The eggs were baked in the true “ camp-meeting ” style, the 
whisky was drunk, and — so was the company. Bill Day’s rather 


156 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


red eyes grew redder, and his nose shone with delight as he 
shuffled the greasy pack of “ kyerds.” The maudlin smile crossed 
the habitually melancholy lines of his face in a way that split 
and splintered his visage into a curious contradiction of emotions. 

“ H — a — oo — p ! ” he shouted, throwing away the cards over 
the heads of his companions. “ Ha — oop ! boys, thish is big — 
boo ! hoo ! ha — oop ! I say is big. Let’s do somethin’ ! ” 

Here there was a confused cry that “ it was big, and that they 
bad better do somethin’ or ’nother.” 

“ Let’s blow up the ole school-house,” said Bill Day, who was 
not friendly to education. 

“ I tell you what,” said Bob Short, who was dealing the cards 
in another set — “I tell you what,” and Bob winked his eyes vig- 
orously, and looked more solemn and wise than he could have 
looked if it had not been for the hard eggs and the whisky — 
“I tell you what,” said Bob a third time, and halted, for his 
mind’s activity was a little choked by the fervor of his emotions 
— “ I tell you what, boys ” 

“Wal,” piped Jim West in a cracked voice, “ you’ve told us 
what four times, I ’low; now s’pose you tell us somethin’ else.” 

“ I tell you what, boys,” said Bob Short, suddenly remember- 
ing his sentence, “ don’t let’s do nothin’ that’ll git us into no 
trouble arterwards. Ef we blow up the school-house we’ll be 
’rested fer bigamy or— or— what d’ye call it ? ” 

“For larson,” said Bill Day, hardly able to restrain another 
whoop. 

“ No, ’taint larson,” said Bob Short, looking wiser than a 
chief -justice, “ it’s arsony. Now I say, don’t let’s go to peniten- 
tiary for no — no larson — no arsony, I mean.” 

11 Ha oop ! ” said Bill. “ Let’s do somethin’ ludikerous. 


somethin’ ludikerous. 


157 


Hurrah for arsony and larson ! Dog-on the penitentiary ! 
Ha— oop 1” 


“ Let’s go fer the Dutchman,” said Norman Anderson, just 
drunk enough to be good-naturedly murderous and to speak in dia- 



somethin’ ludikerous. 


lect. “ Gus is turned out to committin’ larson by breakin’ into peo- 
ple’s houses an’ has run off. Now let’s tar and feather the ole 
one. Of course, he’s a thief. Dutchmen always is, I ’low. Clark 


158 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


township don’t want none of ’em, I’ll be dog-oned if it do,” 
and Norman got up and struck his fist on the counter. 

“ An’ they won’t nobody hurt you ; you see, he’s on’y a 
Dutchman,” said Bob Short, “ Larson on a Dutchman don’t 
hold.” 

“I say, let’s hang him,” said Bill Day. “Ha — oop! Let’s 
hang him, or do somethin’ else ludikerous ! ” 

“ I wouldn’t mind,” grinned Norman Anderson, delighted at 
the turn things had taken. “I’d just like to see him hung.” 

“ So would I,” said Bill Day, leaning over to Norman. “ Ef 
a Dutchman wash to court my sishter, I’d ” 

“ He’d be a fool ef he did,” piped Jim West. For Bill Day’s 
sister was a “maid not vendible,” as Shakespeare has it. 

“ See yer,” said Bill, trying in vain to draw his coat. “ Looky 
yer, Jeems ; ef you say anythin’ agin Ann Marier, I’ll commit 
the wust larson on you you ever seed.” 

“I didn’t say nothin’ agin Ann Marier,” squeaked Jim. “I 
•was talkin’ agin the Dutch.” 

“ Well, that’sh all right. Ha — oop ! Boys, let’s do somethin’, 
larson or arsony or — somethin’.” 

A bucket of tar and some feathers were bought, for which 
young Anderson was made to pay, and Bill Day insisted on 
buying fifteen feet of rope. “Bekase,” as he said, “arteryou git 
the feathers on the bird, you may — you may want to help him to 
go to roosht you know, on a hickory limb. Ha— oop ! Come 
along, boys ; I say let’s do somethin’ ludikerous, ef it’s nothin’ 
but a little larson.” 

And so they went galloping down the road, nine drunken 
fools. For it is one of the beauties of lynch law, that, however 
justifiable it may seem in some instances, it always opens the 


SOMETHIN’ LITDIKEROtTS. 


159 


way to villainous outrages. Some of my readers will protest 
that a man was never lynched for the crime of being a Dutch- 
man. Which only shows how little they know of the intense 
prejudice and lawless violence of the early West. Some day 
people will not believe that men have been killed in California 
for being Chinamen. 

Of the nine who started, one, the drunkest, fell off and broke 
his arm; the rest rode up in front of the cabin of Gottlieb Wehlc. 
I do not want to tell how they alarmed the mother at her 
late sewing and dragged Gottlieb out of his bed. I shudder 
now when I recall one such outrage to which I was an unwill- 
ing witness. Norman threw the rope round Gottlieb’s neck and 
declared for hanging. Bill Day agreed. It would be so ludik- 
erous, you know! 

“Vot hash I tun ? Hey? Yot vor you dries doo hanks me 
already, hey ? ” cried the honest German, w 7 ho was willing enough 
to have the end of the world come, but who did not like the idea 
of ascending alone, and in this fashion. 

Mrs. Wehle pushed her way into the mob and threw the rope 
off her husband’s neck, and began to talk with vehemence in 
German. For a moment the drunken fellows hung back out of 
respect for a woman. Then Bill Day was suddenly impressed 
with the fact that the duty of persuading Mrs. Wehle to consen* 
to her husband’s execution devolved upon him. 

“ Take keer, boys ; let me talk to the ole woman. I’ll argy 
the case.” 

“You can’t speak Dutch no more nor a hoss can,” squeaked 
Jeems West. 

“Blam’d ef I can’t, though. Hyer, ole woman, firshta 


Dutch?” 


160 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“ Ya.” 

“Now," said Bill, turning to the others in triumph, “what 
did I tell you ? Well, you see, your boy August is a thief.” 

“ He’s not a teef ! ” said the old man. 

“ Shet up your jaw. I say he is. Now, your ole man’s got 
to be hung.” 

“ Yot vor ? ” broke in Gottlieb. 

“Bekase it’s all your own fault. You hadn’t orter be a 
Dutchman.” 

Here the crowd fell into a wrangle. It was not so easy to 
hang a man when such a woman stood there pleading for him. 
Besides, Bob Short insisted that hanging was arsony in the first 
degree, ana they better not do it. To this Bill Day assented. 
He said he ’sposed tar and feathers was only larson in the 
second degree. And then it would be rale ludikerous. And 
now confused cries of “ Bring on the tar ! ” “ Where’s the fea- 
thers ? ” “ Take off his clothes ! ” began to be raised. Norman 
stood out for hanging. Drink always intensified his meanness. 
But the tar couldn’t be found. The man whom they had left 
lying by the roadside with a broken arm had carried the tar, 
and had been well coated with it himself in his fall. 

“ Ha-oop ! ” shouted Bill Day. “ Let’s do somethin’. Dog-on 
the arsony ! Let’s hang him as high as Dan’el.” 

And with that the rope was thrown over Gottlieb’s neck and 
he was hurried off to the nearest tree. The rope was then put 
over a limb, and a drunken half-dozen got ready to pull, while 
Norman Anderson adjusted the noose and valiant Bill Day un- 
dertook to keep off Mrs. Wehle. 

“ All ready ! Pull up ! Ha-oop ! ” shouted Bill Day, and the 
crowd pulled, but Mrs. Wehle had slipped off the noose again. 


somethin’ ludikerous. 


161 


and the volunteer executioners fell over one another in such a 
way as to excite the derisive laughter of Bill Day, who thought 
it perfectly ludikerous. But before the laugh had finished, 
the indignant Gottlieb had knocked Bill Day over and sent 
Norman after him. The blow sobered them a little, and sud- 
denly destroyed Bill’s ambition to commit “ arsony,” or do any- 
thing else ludikerous. But Norman was furious, and under 
his lead Wehle’s arms were now bound with the rope and a con- 
sultation was held, during which little Wilhelmina pleaded for 
her father effectively, and more by her tears and cries and the 
wringing of her chubby hands than by any words. Bill Day said 
he be blamed ef that little Dutch gal’s takin’ on so didn't kinder 
make him feel sorter scrimp3hous you know. But the mob could 
not quit without doing something. So it was resolved to give 
Gottlieb a good ducking in the river and send him into Kentucky 
with a warning not to come back. They went down the ravine 
past Andrew’s castle to the river. Mrs. Wehle followed, believ- 
ing that her husband would be drowned, and little Wilhelmina 
ran and pulled the alarm and awakened the Backwoods Phi- 
losopher, who soon threw himself among them, but too late to 
dissuade them from their purpose, for Andrew’s own skiff, the 
11 Grisilde ” by name, with three of the soberest of the party, 
bad already set out to convey Wehle, after one hasty immersion, 
to the other shore, while the rest stood round hallooing like mad- 
men to prevent any alarm that Wehle might iaise attracting at- 
tention on the other side. 


162 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 


THE GIANT GREAT-HEART. 



S soon as Andrew’s skiff, the “ Grisilde,” was 
brought back and the ruffians had gone off up the 
ravine, Andrew left Mrs. Wehle sitting by the fire 
in the loom-room of the castle, while he crossed 
the river to look after Gottlieb. Little Wilhelmina 
insisted on going with him, and as she handled a steering-oar 
well he took her along. They found Gottlieb with his arms 
cruelly pinioned sitting on a log in a state of utter dejection, 
and dripping with water from his ducking. 

“ Ich zay, Antroo, ish dish vat dey galls a vree goontry, 
already ? A blace vare troonk shcounders dosh vot ever dey 
hadn’t ort ! Dat is vree koontry. Mein knabe ish roon off ver 
liebin a Yangee; unt a vool he ish, doo. Unt ich ish hoong 
unt troundt unt darrdt unt vedderd unt drakt out indoo de rib- 
ber, unt dolt if I ko back do mein vrau unt kinder I zhall pe kilt 
vunst more already. Unt I shpose if ich shtays here der Gain- 
duckee beobles vill hang me unt dar me unt trown me all over 
in der ribber, doo, already, pekoz I ish Deutsch. Ich zay de voorld 
ish all pad, unt it aud doo pe vinished vunst already, I ton’t gare 
how quick, so ash dem droonk vools kit vot pelongs doo ’em 
venever Gabrel ploes his drumbet.” 



TO THE RESCUE. 













f 























* 


I 

















































THE GIANT GREAT-HEART. 


165 


“ They’ll get that in due time, my friend,” said Andrew, un- 
tying the rope with which Gottlieb had been pinioned. “ Come, 
let us go back to our own shore.” ; 

“ Bud daint my zhore no more. Dey said I’d god doo hang 
again vunst more if I ever grossed de Ohio Ribber vunst again al- 
ready, but I ton’t vants doo hang no more vor noddin already.” 

“ But I’ll take care of that,” said Andrew. “ Before to-morrow 
night I’ll make your house the safest place in Clark township. 
I’ve got the rascals by the throat now. Trust me.” 

It took much entreaty on the part of Andrew and much 
weeping and kissing on the part of Wilhelmina to move the heart 
of the terrified Gottlieb. At last he got into the skiff and allowed 
himself to be rowed back again, declaring all the way that he 
nebber zee no zich a vree koontry ash dish voz already. 

When Bill Day and his comrades got up the next morning 
and began to think of the transactions of the night, they did not 
seem nearly so ludikerous as they had at the time. And when 
Norman Anderson and Bill Day and Bob Short read the notice 
on the door of MandlufFs store they felt that “ arsony ” might 
have a serious as well as a ludikerous side. 

Andrew at first intended to institute proceedings against the 
rioters, but he knew that the law was very uncertain against 
the influences which the eight or nine young men might bring to 
bear, and the prejudices of the people against the Dutch. To 
prosecute would be to provoke another riot. So he contented 
himself with this 

“ Proclamation ! 

“ To whom it mat concern : I have a list of eight men connected 
with the riotous mob which broke into the house of Gottlieb Wehle, a 
peaceable and unoffending citizen of the United States. The said eight 


166 


THE END OF THE WOBLD. 


men proceeded to commit an assault and battery on the person of the 
said Gottlieb Wehle, and even endeavored at one time to take his life. 
And the said riotous conduct was the result of a conspiracy, and the 
said assault with intent to kill was with malice aforethought. The said 
eight men, aftei having committed grievous outrages upon him by 
dipping him in the water and by other means, warned the said Wehle 
not to return to the State. Now, therefore, I give notice to all 
and several of those concerned in these criminal proceedings that 
the said Wehle has returned by my advice ; and that if so much as a 
hair of his head or a splinter of his property is touched I will appear 
against said parties and will prosecute them until I secure the inflic- 
tion of the severest penalties made and provided for the punishment 
of such infamous crimes. I hope I am well enough known here to 
render it certain that if I once begin proceedings nothing but success 
or my death or the end of the world can stop them. 

“ Andrew Anderson, 

“ Backwoods Philosopher. 

“At the Castle, May 12th, 1843.” 

“ It don’t look so ludikerous as it did, does it, Bill ? ” squeaked 
Jim West, as he read the notice over Bill’s shoulder. 

“ Shet your mouth, you fool!” said Bill. “Don’t you never 
peep. Ef I’d a been sober I might a knowed ole Grizzly would 
interfere. He always does.” 

In truth, Andrew was a sort of Perpetual Champion of the 
Oppressed, and those who did not like him feared him, which is 
the next best thing. 


A CHAPTER OF BETWEENS. 


167 


CHAPTER XXV. 


A CHAPTER OF BETWEENS. 



ID you ever move? And, in moving, did you 
ever happen to notice how many little things there 
are to be picked up? Now that I am about to 
shift the scene of my story from Clark township, 
the narrow stage upon which it has progressed 
through two dozen chapters, I find a great number of little 
things to be picked up. 

One of the little things to be picked up is Norman Ander- 
son. Very little, if measured soul- wise. When his father had 
read the proclamation of Andrew and divined that Norman 
was interested in the riot, he became thoroughly indignant ; the 
more so, that he felt his own lack of power to do anything 
in the premises against his wife. But when Mrs. Abigail 
heard of the case she was in genuine distress. It showed 
Andrew’s vindictiveness. He would follow her forever with his 
resentments, just because she could not love him. It was not her 
fault that she did not love him. Poor Norman had to suffer all 
the persecutions that usually fall to such innocent creatures. 
She must send him away from home, though it broke her 


168 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


mother’s heart to do it ; for if Andrew didn’t have him took up, 
the old Dutchman would, just because his son had turned out a 
burglar. She said burglar rather emphatically, with a look at 
Julia. 

And so Samuel Anderson took his son to Louisville, and got 
him a place in a commission and produce house on the levee, 
with which Mr. Anderson had business influence. And Samuel 
warned him that he must do his best, for he could not come 
back home now without danger of arrest, and Norman made 
many promises of amendment ; so many, that his future seemed 
to him barren of all delight. And, by way of encouraging him- 
self in the austere life upon which he had resolved to enter, he 
attended the least reputable place of amusement in the city, the 
first night after his father’s departure. 

In Clark township the Millerite excitement was at white heat. 
Some of the preachers in other parts of the country had set one 
day, some another. I believe that Mr. Miller, the founder, never 
had the temerity to set a day. But his followers figured the 
thing more closely, and Elder Hankins had put a fine point 
on the matter. He was certain, for his part, that the time was 
at midnight on the eleventh of August. His followers became 
very zealous, and such is the nature of an infection that scarcely 
anybody was able to resist it. Mrs. Anderson, true to her exci- 
table temper, became fanatic — dreaming dreams, seeing visions, 
hearing voices, praying twenty times a day,* wearing a sourly 
pious face, and making all around her more unhappy than ever. 


* Mrs. Anderson was less devout than some of her co-religionists; the 
wife of a well-known steamboat-clerk was accustomed to pray in private fifty 
times a day, hoping by means of this praying without ceasing to be found ready 
when the trumpet should sound. 


A CHAPTER OF RETWBENS. 


169 


Jonas <3«?clared that ef the noo airth and the noo heaven was 
to be chockful of sech as she, ’most any other place in the 
univarse would be better, akordin’ to his way of thinkin’. He 
said she repented more of other folkses’ sins than anybody he 
ever seed. 

As summer came on, Samuel Anderson, borne away on the 
tide of his own and his wife’s fanatical fever of sublimated 
devotion, discharged Jonas and all his other employes , threw up 
business, and gave his whole attention to the straightening of 
his accounts for the coming day of judgment. Before Jonas 
left to seek a new place he told Cynthy Ann as how as ef he’d 
a met her airlier ’twould a-settled his coffee fer life. He was git- 
tin’ along into the middle of the week now, but he’d come to 
feel like a boy serwce he’d been a livin’ where he could have a 
few sweet and pleasant words — ahem ! — he thought December’d 
be as pleasant as May all the year round ef he could live in the 
aurora borealis of her countenance. And Cynthy Ann enjoyed 
his words so much that she prayed for forgiveness for the next 
week and confessed in class-meeting that she had yielded to 
temptation and sot her heart on the things of this perishin’ 
world. She was af eared she hadn’t always remembered as how 
as she was a poor unworthy dyin’ worm of the dust, and that 
all the beautiful things in this world perished with the usin’. 

And Brother Goshorn, the class-leader at Harden’s Cross- 
Roads, exhorted her to tear every idol from her heart. And 
still the sweet woman’s nature, God’s divine law revealed in her 
heart, did assert itself a little. She planted some pretty-by-nights 
in an old cracked blue-and-white tea-pot and set it on her win- 
dow-sill. Somehow the pretty-by-nights would remind her of 
Jonas, and while she tried to forget him with one half of her 


170 


THE END OP THE WORLD, 


nature, the other and better part (the depraved part, she would 
have told you) cherished the memory of his smallest act and 
word. In fact, the flowers had no association with Jonas except 
that along with the awakening of her love came this little sen- 
timent for flowers into the dry desert of her life. But one day 
Mrs. Anderson discovered the old blue broken tea-pot with its 
young plants. 

“ Why, Cynthy Ann ! ” she cried, “ a body’d think you’d have 
more sense than to do such a soft thing as to be raisin’ posies at 
your time of life ! And that when the world is drawing to a 
close, too ! You’ll be one of the foolish virgins with no oil to 
your lamp, as sure as you see that day.” 

As for Julia’s flowers, Mrs. Anderson had rudely thrown 
them into the road by way of removing temptation from her and 
turning her thoughts toward the awful realities of the close of 
time. 

But Cynthy Ann blushed and repented, and kept her broken 
tea-pot, with a fearful sense of sin in doing so. She never wa- 
tered the pretty-by-nights without the feeling that she was offer- 
ing sacrifice to an idol. 


A NICE LITTLE GAME. 


171 


CHAPTER XXVI. 


A NICE LITTLE GAME. 



(T was natural enough that the “mud-clerk” on 
the old steamboat Iatan should take a fancy to 
the “ striker,” as the engineer’s apprentice was called. 
Especially since the striker knew so much more than 
the mud-clerk, and was able to advise him about many 
things. A striker with so much general information was rather 
a novelty, and all the officers fancied him, except Sam Munson, 
the second engineer, who had a natural jealousy of a striker that 
knew more than he did. 

The striker had learned rapidly, and was trusted to stand a 
regular watch. The first engineer and the third were together, 
and the second engineer and the striker took the other watch. 
The boat in this way got the services of a competent engineer 
while paying him only a striker’s wage. 

About the time the heavily-laden Iatan turned out of the 
Mississippi into the Ohio at Cairo at six in the evening, the striker 
went off watch, and he ought to have gone to bed to prepare him- 
self for the second watch of the night, especially as he would 
only have the dog-watch between that and the forenoon. But 
a passenger had got aboard at Cairo, whose face was familiar. 



172 


the end op the world. 


The sight of it had aroused a throng of old associations, pleasant 
and unpleasant, and a throng of emotions the most tender and 
the most wrathful the striker had ever felt. Sleep he could 
not, and so, knowing that the mud-clerk was on watch, he sought 
the office after nine o’clock, and stood outside the bar talking 
to his friend, who had little to do, since most of the freight had 
been shipped through, and his bills for Paducah were all ready. 
The striker talked with the mud-clerk, but watched the throng of 
passengers who drank with each other at the bar, smoked in the 
“ social hall,” read and wrote at the tables in the gentlemen s 
cabin, or sat with doffed hats and chatted gallantly in the ladies’ 
cabin, which was visible as a distant background, seen over a 
long row of tables with green covers and under a long row of 
gilded wooden stalactites, which were intended to be ornamental. 
The little pendent prisms beneath the chandeliers rattled gayly 
as the boat trembled at each stroke of her wheels, and gaping 
backwoodsmen, abroad for the first time, looked at all the rusty 
gingerbread- work, and wondered if kings were able to afford any- 
thing half so fine as the cabin of the “ palatial steamer Iatan,” 
as she was described on the bills. The confused murmur of 
many voices, mixed with the merry tinkling of the glass pen- 
dants, gave the whole an air of excitement. 

But the striker did not see the man he was looking for. 

“ Who got on at Cairo ? I think I saw a man from our part 
of the country,” he said. 

“ I declare, I don’t know,” said the mud-clerk, who drawled 
his words in a cold-blooded way. “ Let me look. Here’s A. Rob- 
ertson, and T. Le Fevre, and L. B. Sykes, and N. Anderson.” 

“ Where is Anderson going ? ” 

“ Paid through to Louisville. Do you know him ? w 


A NICE LITTLE GAME. 


173 


But just then Norman Anderson himself walked in, and 
went up to the bar with a new acquaintance. They did not 
smoke the pipe of peace, like red Americans, but, like white 
Americans, they had a mysterious liquid carefully compounded, 
and by swallowing this they solemnly sealed their new-made 
friendship after the curious and unexplained rite in use among 
their people. 

Norman had been dispatched on a collecting trip, and having 
nine hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, he felt as much 
elated as if it had been his own money. The gentleman with 
whom he drank, had a band of crape around his white hat. 
He seemed very near-sighted. 

“ If that greeny is a friend of yours, Gus, I declare you’d 
better tell him not to tie to the serious-looking young fellow in 
the white hat and gold specs, unless he means to part with all 
his loose change before bed-time.” 

That is what the mud-clerk drawled to August the striker, 
but the striker seemed to hear the words as something spoken 
afar off. For just then he was seeing a vision of a drunken mob, 
and a rope, and a pleading woman, and a brave old man 
threatened with death. Just then he heard harsh and mud- 
dled voices, rude oaths, and jeering laughter, and above it all 
the sweet pleading of a little girl begging for a father’s life. 
And the quick blood came into his fair German face, and he 
felt that he could not save this Norman Anderson from the 
toils of the gambler, though he might, if provoked, pitch him 
over the guard of the boat. For was not Andrew’s letter, which 
described the mob, in his pocket, and burning a hole in his 
pocket as it had been ever since he received it? 

But then this was Julia’s brother, and there was nothing he 


174 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


would not do for Julia. So, sometime after the mud-clerk had 
ceased to speak, the striker gave utterance to both impulses by 
replying, “ He’s no friend of mine,” a little crisply, and then 
softly adding, “ Though I shouldn’t like to see him fleeced.” 

By this time a new actor had appeared on the scene in the 
person of a man with a black mustache and side- whiskers, who 
took a seat behind a card-table near the bar. 

“ H’llo ! ” said the mud-clerk in a low and lazy voice, “ Par- 
kins is back again. After his scrape at Paducah last February, 
he disappeared, and he’s been shady ever since. He’s growed 
whiskers since, so’s not to be recognized. But he’ll be skeerce 
enough when we get to Paducah. Now, see how quick he’ll 
catch the greenies, won’t you ? ” The prospect was so charming 
as almost to stimulate the mud-clerk to speak with some ani- 
mation. 

But August Wehle, the striker on the Iatan, had an uncom- 
fortable feeling that he had seen that face before, and that the 
long mustache and side-whiskers had grown in a remark- 
ably short space of time. Could it be that there were two men 
who could spread a smile over the lower half of their faces in 
that automatic way, while the spider-eyes had no sort of sym- 
pathy with it ? Surely, this man with black whiskers and mus- 
tache was not just like the singing-master at Sugar-Grove school- 
house, who had “ red-top hay on to his upper lip,” and yet — and 
yet 

“ Gentlemen,” said Parkins — his Dickensian name would be 
Smirkins— “ I want to play a little game just for the fun of the 
thing. It is a trick with three cards. I put down three cards, 
face up. Here is six of diamonds, eight of spades, and the ace 
of hearts. Now, I will turn them over so quickly that I will 



A NICE LITTLE GAJME. 




A NICE LITTLE GAME. 


177 


defy any of you to tell which is the ace. Do you see ? Now, I 
would like to bet the wine for the company that no gentleman 
here can turn up the ace. All I want is a little sport. Something 
to pass away the evening and amuse the company. Who will 
bet the wine ? The Scripture says that the hand is quicker than 
the eye, and I warn you that if you bet, you will probably lose.” 
And here he turned the cards back, with their faces up, and the 
card which everybody felt sure was the ace proved apparently 
to be that card. Most of the on-lookers regretted that they had 
not bet, seeing that they would certainly have won. Again the 
cards were put face down, and the company was bantered to 
bet the wine. Nobody would bet. 

After a good deal of fluent talk, and much dexterous hand- 
ling of the cards, in a way that seemed clear enough to 
everybody, and that showed that everybody’s guess was right as 
to the place of the ace, the near-sighted gentleman, who had 
drunk with Norman, offered to bet five dollars. 

“ Five dollars ! ” returned Parkins, laughing in derision, “ five 
dollars ! Do you think I’m a gambler ? I don’t want any gen- 
tleman’s money. I’ve got all the money I need. However, 
if you would like to bet the wine with me, I am agreed.” 

The near-sighted gentleman declined to wager anything but 
just the five dollars, and Parkins spumed his proposition with 
the scorn of a gentleman who would on no account bet a cent of 
money. But he grew excited, and bantered the whole crowd. 
Was there no gentleman in the crowd who would lay a wage* 
of wine for the company on this interesting little trick ? It was 
strange to him that no gentleman had spirit enough to make the 
bet. But no gentleman had spirit enough to bet the wine. Evi- 
dently there were no gentlemen in the company. 


178 


THE E17D OF THE WORLD. 


However, the near-sighted man with the white hat adorned 
with crape now proposed in a crusty tone to bet ten dollars that 
he could lift the ace. He even took out a ten-dollar bill, and, 
after examining it, in holding it close to his nose as a penurious 
man might, extended his hand with, “ If you’re in earnest, let’s 
know it. I’ll bet you ten.” 

At this Parkins grew furious. He had never been so persist- 
ently badgered in all his life. He’d have the gentleman know 
that he was not a gambler. He had all the money he wanted, 
and as for betting ten dollars, he shouldn’t think of it. But now 
that the gentleman — he said gentleman with an emphasis — now 
that the gentleman seemed determined to bet money, he would 
show him that he was not to be backed down. If the young 
man would like to wager a hundred dollars, he would cheerfully 
bet with him. If the gentleman did not feel able to bet a hun- 
dred dollars, he hoped he would not say any more about it. He 
hadn’t intended to bet money at all. But he wouldn’t bet less 
than a hundred dollars with anybody. A man who couldn’t 
afford to lose a hundred dollars, ought not to bet. 

“ Who is this fellow in the white hat with spectacles ? ” 
August asked of the mud-clerk. 

“ That is Smith, Parkins’s partner. He is only splurging 
round to start up the greenies.” And the mud-clerk spoke with 
an indifference and yet a sort of dilettante interest in the game 
that shocked his friend, the striker. 

“ Why don’t they set these blacklegs ashore ? ” said August, 
whose love of justice was strong. 

“ You tell,” drawled the mud-clerk. “ The first clerk’s tried it, 
but the old man protects ’em, and” (in a whisper) “get’s his 
share, I guess. He can set them off whenever he wants to.” (J 


A NICE LITTLE GAME; 


179 


must expiam that there is only one “ old man ” on a steamboat — 
that is, the captain.) 

By this time Parkins had turned and thrown his cards so that 
everybody knew or thought he knew where the ace was. Smith, 
the man with the white hat, now rose five dollars more and 
offered to bet fifteen. But Parkins was more indignant than ever. 
He told Smith to go away. He thrust his hand into his pocket 
and drew out a handful of twenty-dollar gold-pieces. “ If any 
gentleman wants to bet a hundred dollars, let him come on. 
A man who couldn’t lose a hundred would better keep still.” 

Smith now made a big jump. He’d go fifty. Parkins 
wouldn’t listen to fifty. He had said that he wouldn’t bet less 
than a hundred, and he wouldn’t. He now pulled out handful 
after handful of gold, and piled the double-eagles up like a forti- 
fication in front of him, while the crowd surged with excitement 

At last Mr. Smith, the near-sighted gentleman in spectacles, 
the gentleman who wore black crape on a white hat, con- 
cluded to bet a hundred dollars. He took out his little porte- 
monnaie and lifted thence a hundred-dollar bill. 

“ Well,” said he angrily, “ I’ll bet you a hundred.” And he 
laid down the bill. Parkins piled five twenty-dollar gold-pieces 
atop it. Each man felt that he could lift, the ace in a moment. 
That card at the dealer’s right was certainly the ace. Norman was 
sure of it. He wished it had been his wager instead of Smith’s. 
But Parkins stopped Smith a moment. 

“ Now, young man,” he said, “ if you don’t feel perfectly able 
to lose that hundred dollars, you’d better take it back.” 

“ I am just as able to lose it as you are,” said Smith snap- 
pishly, and to everybody’s disappointment he lifted not the card 
everybody had fixed on, but the middle one, and so lost his money- 


180 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“ Why didn’t you take the other ? ” said Norman boastfully, 
4< I knew it was the ace.” 

“ Why didn’t you bet, then ? ” said Smith, grinning a little. 
Norman wished he had. But he had not a hundred dollars of 
his own, and he had scruples — faint, and yet scruples, or rather 
alarms — at the thought of risking his employer’s money on a 
wager. While he was weighing motive against motive, Smith 
bet again, and again, to Norman’s vexation, selected a card that 
was so obviously wrong that Norman thought it a pity that so 
near-sighted a man should bet and lose. He wished he had 
a hundred dollars of his own and There, Smith was bet- 

ting again. This time he consulted Norman before making his 
selection, and of course turned up the right card, remarking that 
he wished his eyes were so keen ! He would win a thousand 
dollars before bed-time if his eyes were so good ! Then he took 
Norman into partnership, and Norman found himself suddenly in 
possession of fifty dollars, gotten without trouble. This turned 
his brain. Nothing is so intoxicating to a weak man as money 
acquired without toil. So Norman continued to bet, sometimes 
independently, sometimes in partnership with -the gentlemanly 
Smith. He was borne on by the excitement of varying fortune, 
a varying fortune absolutely under control of the dealer, whose 
sleight-of-hand was perfect. And the varying fortune had an un- 
varying tendency in the long run — to put three stakes out of five 
into the pockets of the gamblers, who found the little game very 
interesting amusement for gentlemen. 


THE RESULT OF AN EVENING WITH GENTLEMEN. 181 


CHAPTER XXVn. 


THE RESULT OF AN EVENING WITH GENTLEMEN. 



LL the time that these smiling villains were by 
consummate art drawing their weak-headed victim 
into their toils, what was August doing? Where 
were his prompt decision of character, his quick 
intelligence, his fine German perseverance, that 
should have saved the brother of Julia Anderson from harpies ? 
Could our blue-eyed young countryman, who knew how to cher- 
ish noble aspirations walking in a plowman’s furrow — could he 
stand there satisfying his revenge by witnessing the ruin of a 
young man who, like many others, was wicked only because he 
was weak ? 

In truth, August was a man whose feelings were persistent. 
His resentment was — like his love — constant. But his love of 
justice was higher and more persistent, and he could not have 
seen any one fleeced in this merciless way without taking sides 
strongly with the victim. Much less could he see the brother 
of Julia tempted on to the rocks by the false lights of villainous 
wreckers without a great desire to save him. For the letter of 
Andrew had ceased now to bum in his pocket. That other let- 
ter — the only one that Julia had been able to send through Cyn- 


182 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


thy Ann and Jonas — that other letter, written all over with such 
tender extravagances as love feeds on ; the thought of that other 
letter, which told how beautiful and precious were the invita- 
tions to the weary and heavy-laden, had stilled resentment, and 
there came instead a keen desire to save Norman for the sake 
of Julia and justice. But how to do it was an embarrassing ques- 
tion — a question that was more than August could solve. There 
was a difficulty in the weakness and wrong-headedness of Nor- 
man; a difficulty in Norman’s prejudice against Dutchmen in 
general and August in particular; a difficulty in the fact that 
August was a sort of a fugitive, if not from justice, certainly from 
injustice. 

But when nearly a third of Norman’s employer’s money 
had gone into the gamblers’ heap, and when August began to 
understand that it was another man’s money that Norman was 
losing, and that the victim was threatened by no half-way ruin, 
he determined to do something, even at the risk of making 
himself known to Norman and to Parkins — was he Hum- 
phreys in disguise ? — and at the risk of arrest for house-break- 
ing. August acted with his eyes open to all the perils from gam- 
blers’ pistols and gamblers’ malice ; and after he had started to 
interfere, the mud-clerk called him back, and said, in his half -in- 
different way: 

“ Looky here, Gus, don’t be a blamed fool. That’s a purty 
little game. That greeny’s got to learn to let blacklegs alone, 
and he don’t look like one that’ll take advice. Let him scorch 
a little ; it’ll do him good. It’s healthy for young men. That’s 
the reason the old man don’t forbid it, I s’pose. And these fel- 
lows carry good shooting-irons with hair-triggers, and I declare I 
don’t want to be bothered writing home to your mother, and 


THE RESULT OF AN EVENING WITn GENTLEMEN, 183 


explaining to her that you got killed in a fight with blacklegs. 
I declare I don’t, you see. And then you’ll get the ‘ old man ’ 
down on you, if you let a bird out of the trap in which he goes 
snucks; you will, I declare. And you’ll get walking-papers at 
Louisville. Let the game alone. You haven’t got any hand to 
play against Parkins, nohow ; and I reckon the greenhorns are 



his lawful prey. Cats couldn’t live without mice. You’ll lose 
your place, I declare you will, if you say a word.” 

August stopped long enough to take in the full measure of 
his sacrifice. So far from being deterred by it, he was more 
than ever determined to act. Not the love of Julia, so much, 
now, but the farewell prayer and benediction and the whole life 
and spirit of the sweet Moravian mother in her child-full house 
at home were in his mind at this moment. Things which 
a man will not do for the love of woman he may do fof 


184 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


the love of God — and it was with a sense of moral exaltation 
that August entered into the lofty spirit of self-sacrifice he had 
seen in his mother, and caught himself saying, in his heart, as he 
had heard her say, “ Let us do anything for the Father’s sake ! ” 
Some will call this cant. So much the worse for them. This 
motive, too little felt in our day — too little felt in any day — is 
the great impulse that has enabled men to do the bravest things 
that have been done. The sublimest self-sacrifice is only possible 
to a man by the aid of some strong moral tonic. God’s love 
is the chief support of the strongest spirits. 

August touched Norman on the arm. The face of the latter 
expressed anything but pleasure at meeting him, now that he 
felt guilty. But this was not the uppermost feeling with 
Norman. He noticed that August’s clothes were spotted with 
engine-grease, and his first fear was of compromising his 
respectability. 

In a hurried way August began to explain to him that he was 
betting with gamblers, but Smith stood close to them, looking 
at August in such a contemptuous way as to make Norman feel 
very uncomfortable, and Parkins seeing the crowd attracted by 
August’s explanations — which he made in some detail, by way 
of adapting himself to Norman — of the trick by which the 
upper card is thrown out first, Parkins said, “ I see you un- 
derstand the game, young man. If you do, why don’t you bet ? ” 

At this the crowd laughed, and Norman drew away from 
the striker’s greasy clothes, and said that he didn’t want to speak 
any further to a burglar, he believed. But August followed, deter- 
mined to warn him against Smith. Smith was ahead of him, 
however, saying to Norman, “ Look out for your pockets — 
that greasy fellow will rob you.” 


The result of ax evening with gentlemen. i8S 


And Norman, who was nothing if not highly respectable, 
resolved to shake off the troublesome “ Dutchman ” at once. “ I 
don’t know what you are up to now, hut at home vou are known 
as a thief. So please let me alone, will you ? ” This Norman 
tried to say in an annihilating way. 

The crowd looked for a fight. August said loud enough to be 
heard, “ You know very well that you lie. I wanted to save you 
from being a thief, but you are betting money now that is not 
yours.” 

The company, of course, sympathized with the gentleman and 
against the machine-oil on the striker’s clothes, so that there 
arose quickly a murmur, started by Smith, “ Put the bully out,” 
and August was “ hustled.” It is well that he was not shot. 

It was quite time for him to go on watch now ; for the loud- 
ticking marine-clock over the window of the clerk’s office pointed 
to three minutes past twelve, and the striker hurried to his post 
at the starboard engine, with the bitterness of defeat and the 
shame of insult in his heart. He had sacrificed his place, doubt- 
less, and risked much beside, and all for nothing. The third 
engineer complained of his tardiness in not having relieved 
him three minutes before, and August went to his duties with a 
bitter heart. To a man who is persistent, as August was, 
defeat of any sort is humiliating. 

As for Norman, he bet after this just to show his indepen- 
dence and to show that the money was his own, as well as in the 
vain hope of winning back what he had lost. He bet every cent. 
Then he lost his watch, and at half -past, one o’clock he went to 
his state-room, stripped of all loose valuables, and sweating great 
drops. And the mud-clerk, who was still in the office, remarked 
to himself, with a pleasant chuckle, that it was good for him ,• he 


186 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


declared it was ; teach the fellow to let monte alone, and keep his 
eyes peeled when he traveled. It would so! 

The idea was a good one, and he went down to the star- 
hoard engine and told the result of the nice little game to his 
friend the striker, drawling it out in a relishful way, how the 
blamed idiot never stopped till they’d got his watch, and then 
looked like as if he’d a notion to jump into the “ drink.” But 
’twould cure him of meddlin’ with monte. It would so ! 

He walked away, and August was just reflecting on the heart- 
lessness of his friend, when the mud-clerk came back again, and 
began drawling his words out as before, just as though each dis- 
tinct word were of a delightful flavor and he regretted that he 
must part with it. 

“ I’ve got you even with Parkins, old fellow. He’ll be strung 
up on a lamp-post at Paducah, I reckon. I saw a Paducah man 
aboard, and I put a flea in his ear. We’ve got to lay there an 
hour or two to put off a hundred barrels of molasses and two 
hundred sacks of coffee and two lots of plunder. There’ll be 
a hot time for Parkins. He let on to marry a girl and fooled her. 
They’ll teach him a lesson. You’ll be off watch, and we’ll have 
some fun looking on.” And the mud-clerk evidently thought 
that it would be even funnier to see Parkins hanged than it had 
been to see him fleece Norman. Gus the striker did not see how 
either scene could be very entertaining. But he was sick at heart, 
and one could not expect him to show much interest in manly 
sport*. 


WAKING UP AN UGLY CUSTOMER 


18? 


CHAPTER XXVm. 


WAKING UP AN UGLY CUSTOMER. 



HE steady beat of the wheels and the incessant 
clank of the engines went on as usual. The boat 
was loaded almost to her guards, and did not make 
much speed. The wheels kept their persistent beat 
upon the water, and the engines kept their rhythmical 
clangor going, until August found himself getting drowsy. 
Trouble, with forced inaction, nearly always has a soporific 
tendency, and a continuous noise is favorable to sleep. Once or 
twice August roused himself to a sense of his responsibility and 
battled with his heaviness. It was nearing the end of his 
watch, for the dog-watch of two hours set in at four o’clock. 
But it seemed to him that four o’clock would never come. 

An incident occurred just at this moment that helped him to 
keep his eyes open. A man went aft through the engine-room 
with a red handkerchief tied round his forehead. In spite of 
this partial disguise August perceived that it was Parkins. He 
passed through to the place where the steerage or deck passen- 
gers are, and then disappeared from August’s sight. He had 
meant to disembark at a wood-yard just below Paducah, but for 


188 


THE END OF THE WORLD, 


some reason the boat did not stop, and now, as August guessed, he 
was hiding himself from Paducah eyes. He was not much too 
60on, for the great bell on the hurricane-deck was already ringing 
for Paducah, and the summer dawn was showing itself faintly 
through the river fog. 

The alarm-bell rang in the engine-room, and Wehle stood by 
his engine. Then the bell rang to stop the starboard engine, 
and August obeyed it. The pilot of a Western steamboat de- 
pends much upon his engines for steerage in making a landing, 
and the larboard engine was kept running a while longer in order 
to bring the deeply-loaded boat round to her landing at the prim- 
itive wharf-boat of that day. There is something fine in the 
faith with which an engineer obeys the bell of the pilot, not 
knowing what may be ahead, not inquiring what may be the 
effect of the order, but only doing exactly what he is bid when 
he is bid. August had stopped his engine, and stood trying to 
keep his mind off Parkins and the events of the night, that he 
might be ready to obey the next signal for his engine. But the 
bell rang next to stop the other engine, at which the second 
engineer stood, and August was so free from responsibility in re- 
gard to that that he hardly noticed the sound of the bell, until it 
rang a second time more violently. Then he observed that the 
larboard engine still ran. Was Munson dead or asleep? Clearly 
it was August’s duty to stand by his own engine. But then he 
was startled to think what damage to property or life might take 
place from the failure of the second engineer to stop his engine. 
While he hesitated, and all these considerations flashed through 
his mind, the pilot’s bell rang again long and loud, and August 
then, obeying an impulse rather than a conviction, ran over to 
the other engine, stopped it, and then, considering that it had 


WAKING UP AN UGLY CUSTOMER. 


189 


run so long against orders, he reversed it and set it to back- 
ing without waiting instructions. Then he seized Munson and 
woke him, and hurried back to his post. But the larboard engine 
had not made three revolutions backward before the boat, hope- 
lessly thrown from her course by the previous neglect, 
struck the old wharf-boat and sunk it. But for the prompt- 
ness and presence of mind with which Wehle acted, the steam- 
boat itself would have suffered severely. The mate and then 
the captain came rushing into the engine-room. Munson was 
discharged at once, and the striker was promised engineer’s 
wages. 

Gfus went off watch at this moment, and the mud-clerk said 
to him, in his characteristically indifferent voice, “ Such luck, I 
declare ! I was sure you would be dismissed for meddling with 
Parkins, and here you are promoted, I declare ! ” 

The mishap occasioned much delay to the boat, as it was very 
inconvenient to deliver freight at that day and at that stage of 
water Without the intervention of the wharf-boat. A full hour 
was consumed in finding a landing, and in rigging the double- 
staging and temporary planks necessary to get the molasses and 
coffee and household “ plunder ” ashore. Some hint that Par- 
kins was on the river had already reached Paducah, and the sher- 
iff and two deputies and a small crowd were at the landing 
looking for him. A search of the boat failed to discover him, 
and the crowd would have ieft the landing but for occasional 
hints slyly thrown out by the mud-clerk as he went about over 
the levee collecting freight-bills. These hints, given in a non- 
committal way, kept the crowd alive with expectation, and when 
the rumors thus started spread abroad, the levee was soon fillet? 
with an excited and angry multitude. 


190 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


If it had been a question of delivering a criminal to justice, 
August would not have hesitated to tell the sheriff where to look. 
But he very well knew that the sheriff could not convey the man 
through the mob alive, and to deliver even such a scoundrel to 
the summary vengeance of a mob was something that he could 
not find it in his heart to do. 

In truth, the sheriff and his officers did not seek very zeal- 
ously for their man. Under the circumstances, it was probable 
he would not surrender himself without a fight, in which some- 
body would be killed, and besides there must ensue a battle with 
the mob. It was what they called an ugly job, and they were 
not loth to accept the captain’s assurance that the gambler had 
gone ashore. 

While August was unwilling to deliver the hunted vil- 
lain to a savage death, he began to ask himself why he might 
not in some way use his terror in the interest of justice. 
For he had just then seen the wretched and bewildered face of 
Norman looking ghastly enough in the fog of the morning. 

At last, full of this notion, and possessed, too, by his habit of 
accomplishing at all hazards what he had begun, August strolled 
back through the now quiet engine-room to the deck-passengers’ 
quarter. It was about half an hour before six o’clock, when the 
dog-watch would expire and he must go on duty again. 
In one of the uppermost of the filthy bunks, in the darkest 
comer, near the wheel, he discovered what he thought to be his 
man. The deck-passengers were still asleep, lying around stu- 
pidly. August paused a moment, checked by a sense of the dan- 
gerousness of his undertaking. Then he picked up a stick of 
wood and touched the gambler, who could not have been very 
sound asleep, lying in hearing of the curses of the mob on the 


Waking up an ugly customer. 191 

shore. At first Parkins did not move, but August gave him a 
still more vigorous thrust. Then he peered out between the 
blanket and the handkerchief over his forehead. 

“ I will take that money you won last night from that young 
man, if you please.” 



WAKING UP AN UGLY CUSTOMER. 


Parkins saw that it was useless to deny his identity. “Do 
you want to be shot ? ” he asked fiercely. 

“ Not any more than you want to be hung,” said August. 
“The one would follow the other in five minutes. Give back 


that money and I will go away.” 


192 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


The gambler trembled a minute. He was fairly at bay. He 
took out a roll of bills and handed it to August. There was but 
five hundred. Smith had the other four hundred and fifty, he 
said. But August had a quiet German steadiness of nerve. He 
said that unless the other four hundred and fifty were paid at 
once he should call in the sheriff or the crowd. Parkins knew 
that every minute August stood there increased his peril, 
and human nature is now very much like human nature in the 
days of Job. The devil understood the subject very well when 
he said that all that a man hath will he give for his life. Parkins 
paid the four hundred and fifty in gold-pieces. He would have 
paid twice that if August had demanded it. 


AUGUST AND NO EM AN, 


193 


CHAPTER XXIX. 


AUGUST AND NORMAN. 



<N a story such as I meant this to be, the devel- 
opment of character stands for more than the evo- 
lution of the plot, and herein is the true significance 
of this contact of Wehle with the gamblers, and, in- 
deed, of this whole steamboat life. It is not enough 
for one to be good in a country neighborhood ; the sharp con- 
tests and severe ordeals of more exciting life are needed to give 
temper to the character. August Wehle was hardly the same 
man on this morning at Paducah, with the nine hundred and 
fifty dollars in his pocket, that he had been the evening before, 
when he first felt the sharp resentment against the man who 
had outraged his father. In acting on a high plane, one is un- 
consciously lifted to that plane. Men become Christians some- 
times from the effect of sudden demands made upon their higher 
moral nature, demands which compel them to choose between 
a life higher than their present living, or a moral degradation. 
Such had been August’s experience. He had been drawn up- 
ward toward God by the opportunity and necessity for heroic 
action. I have no doubt the good Samaritan got more out of his 
own kindness than the robbed Jew did. 


194 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Before he had a chance to restore the money to its rightful 
owner, the two hours of dog-watch had expired, and he was 
obliged to go on watch again, much to his annoyance. He had 
been nearly twenty-four hours without sleep, and after a night 
of such excitement it was unpleasant as well as perilous to 
have to hold this money, which did not belong to him, for six 
hours longer, liable at any minute to get into difficulty through 
any scheme of the gamblers and their allies, by which his recovery 
of the money might be misinterpreted. The morning seemed to 
wear away so slowly. All the possibilities of Parkins’s attacking 
him, of young Anderson’s committing suicide, and of the miscon- 
struction that might be put upon his piotives — the making of his 
disinterested action seem robbery — haunted his excitable imagin- 
ation. At last, while the engines were shoving their monotonous 
shafts backward and forward, and the “ palatial steamer ” Iatan 
was slowly pushing her way up the stream, August grew so 
nervous over his money that he resolved to relieve himself of 
part of it. So he sent for the mud-clerk by a passing deck-hand. 

“ I want you to keep this money for me until I get off 
watch,” said August. “I made Parkins stand and deliver this 
morning while we were at Paducah.” 

“You did?” said the mud-clerk, not offering to touch the 
money. “ You risked your life, I declare, for that fool that called 
you a thief. You are a fool, Gus, and nothing but your blamed 
good luck can save you from getting salivated, bright and early, 
some morning. Not a great deal I won’t take that money. I 
don’t relish lead, and I’ve got to live among these fellows all my 
days, and I don’t hold that money for anybody. The old man 
would ship me at Louisville, seeing I never stopped anybody’s 
engine and backed it in a hurry, as you did. If I’d known where 


AUGUST AND N OEM AN. 195 

Parkins was, I’d a dropped a gentle word in the ear of the crowd 
outside, but I wouldn’t a pulled that greeny’s coflee-nuts out of 
the fire, and I won’t hold the hot things for you. I declare 
I won’t. Saltpeter wouldn’t save me if I did.” 

So Gus had to content himself in his nervousness, not allayed 
by this speech, and keep the money in his pocket until noon. 
And, after all the presentiment he had had, noon came round. 
Presentiments generally come from the nerves, and signify 
nothing ; but nobody keeps a tally of the presentiments and 
auguries that fail. When the first-engineer and a new man 
took the engines at noon, Gus was advised by the former to get 
some sleep, but there was no sleep for him until he had found 
Norman, who trembled at the sight of him. 

“ Where is your state-room ? ” said August sternly, for he 
couldn’t bring himself to speak kindly to the poor fellow, even 
in his misery. 

Norman turned pale. He had been thinking of suicide all the 
morning, but he was a coward, and now he evidently felt sure 
that he was to be killed by August. He did not dare disobey, 
but led the way, stopping to try to apologize two or three times, 
but never getting any further than “I — I ” 

Once in the state-room, he sat down on the berth and gasped, 
“I— I ” 

“Here is your money,” said August, handing it to him. “I 
made the gambler give it up.” 

“I — I ” said the astonished and bewildered Norman. 

“ You needn’t say a word. You are a cowardly scoundrel, 
and if you say anything, I’ll knock you down for treating my 
father as you did, Only for — for — well, I didn’t want to see you 
fleeced. ’ 


196 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Norman was ashamed for once, and hung his head. It 
touched the heart of August a little, but the remembrance of the 
attack of the mob on his father made him feel hard again, and 
so his generous act was performed ungraciously. 


AGROUND, 


197 


CHAPTER XXX. 


AGROUND. 



OT the boat. The boat ran on safely enough 
to Louisville, and tied up at the levee, and dis- 
charged her sugar and molasses, and took on a new 
cargo of baled hay and corn and flour, and went 
back again, and made I know not how many trips, 
and ended her existence I can not tell how or when. What 
does become of the old steamboats ? The Iatan ran for years 
after she tied up at Louisville that summer morning, and then 
perhaps she was blown up or burned up ; perchance some cruel 
sawyer transfixed her ; perchance she was sunk by ice, or maybe 
6he was robbed of her engines and did duty as barge, or, what 
Is more probable, she wore out like the one-hoss shay, and just 
tumbled to pieces simultaneously. 

It was not the gambler who got aground that morning. He 
had yet other nice little games, with three cards or more or 
none, to play. 

It was not the mud-clerk who ran aground — good, non-com- 
mittal soul, who never took sides where it would do him any 
harm, and who never worried himself about anything. Dear, 
drawling, optimist philosopher, who could see how other people’s 


198 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


mishaps were best for them, and who took good care not to have 
any himself! It was not he that ran aground. 

It was not Norman Anderson who ran aground. He walked 
into the store with the proud and manly consciousness of having 
done his duty, he made his returns of every cent of money that 
had come into his hands, and, like all other faithful stewards, 
received the cordial commendation of his master. 

But August 'Wslile the striker, just when he was to be 
made an engineer, when he thought he had smooth sailing, sud- 
denly and provokingly found himself fast aground, with no 
spar or capstan by which he might help himself off, with no 
friendly craft alongside to throw him a hawser and pull him off. 

It seems that when the captain promised him promotion, he 
did not know anything of August’s interference with the gam- 
blers. But when Parkins filed his complaint, it touched the 
captain. It was generally believed among the employes of the 
boat that a percentage of gamblers’ gains was one of the “old 
man’s ” perquisites, and he was not the only steamboat captain 
who profited by the nice little games in the cabin upon which 
he closed both eyes. And this retrieved nine hundred and fifty 

dollars was a dead loss of well, it does not matter how much, 

to the virtuous and highly honorable captain. His proportion 
would have been large enough at least to pay his wife’s pew- 
rent in St. James’s Church, with a little something over for char- 
itable purposes. For the captain did not mind giving a disinter- 
ested twenty-five dollars occasionally to those charities that were 
willing to show their gratitude by posting his name as director, 
or his wife’s as “ Lady Manageress.” In thi3 case his right hand 
never knew what his left hand did— how it got the money, for 
instance. 


AGROUND. 


199 


So when August drew his pay he was informed that he was 
discharged. No reason was given. He tried to see the captain. 
But the captain was in the bosom of his family, kissing his own 
well-dressed little boys, and enjoying the respect which only 
exemplary and provident fathers enjoy. And never asking down 
in his heart if these boys might become gamblers’ victims, or 
gamblers, indeed. The captain could not see August the striker, 
for he was at home, and must not be interfered with by any of 
his subordinates. Besides, it was Sunday, and he could not be 
intruded upon — the rector of St. James’s was dining with him 
on his wife’s invitation, and it behooved him to walk circum- 
spectly, not with eye-service as a man-pleaser, but serving the 
Lord. 

So he refused to see the anxious striker, and turned to com- 
pliment the rector on his admirable sermon on the sin of Judas, 
who sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. 

An d August Wehle had nothing left to do. The river was 
falling fast, the large boats above the Falls were, in steamboat- 
man’s phrase, “ laying up ” in the mouths of the tributaries and 
other convenient harbors, there were plenty of engineers unem- 
ployed, and there were no vacancies. 


200 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 


CYNTHY ANN’S SACRIFICE. 



ON AS had been all his life, as he expressed it 
in his mixed rhetoric, “ a wanderin’ sand-hill crane, 
makin’ many crooked paths, and, like the cards in 
French monte, a-tumin’ up suddently in mighty on- 
expected places.” He had been in every queer place 
from Halifax to Texas, and then had come back to his home 
again. Naturally cautious, and especially suspicious of the 
female sex, it is not strange that he had not married. Only when 
he “ tied up to the same w’arf-boat alongside of Cynthy Ann, he 
thought he’d found somebody as was to be depended on in a fog 
or a harricane.” This he told to Cynthy Ann as a reason why 
she should accept his offer of marriage. 

“Jonas,” said Cynthy Ann, “don’t flatter. My heart is 
dreadful weak, and prone to the vanities of this world. It makes 
me abhor myself in dust and sackcloth fer you to say such 
things about poor unworthy me.” 

“ Ef I think ’em, why shouldn’t I say ’em ? I don’t know 
no law agin tellin’ the truth ef you git into a place where you 
can’t no ways help it. I don’t call you angel, fer you a’n’t ; you 
ha’nt got no wings nor feathers. I don’t say as how as you’re 


cynthy ann’s sacrifice. 


201 


pertikeler knock-down handsome. I don’t pertend that you’re a 
spring chicken. I don’t lie nor flatter. I a’n’t goin’ it blind, 
like young men in love. But I do say, with my eyes open and 
in my right senses, and feelin’ solemn, like a man a-makin’ his 
last will and testament, that they a’n’t no sech another woman to 
be found outside the leds of the Bible betwixt the Bay of Fundy 
and the Rio Grande. I’ve ‘ sought round this burdened airth,’ as 
the hymn says, and they a’n’t but jest one. Ef that one’ll jest 
make me happy, I’ll fold my weary pinions and settle down in a 
rustic log-cabin and raise com and potaters till death do us part.” 

Cynthy trembled. Cynthy was a saint, a martyr to religious 
feeling, a medieval nun in her ascetic eschewing of the pleasures 
of life. But Cynthy Ann was also a woman. And a woman 
whose spring-time had passed. When love buds out thus late, 
when the opportunity for the woman’s nature to blossom comes 
unexpectedly upon one at her age, the temptation is not easily 
resisted. Cynthy trembled, but did not quite yield up her Chris- 
tian constancy. 

“ Jonas, I don’t know whether I’d orto or not. I don’t deny — 
I think I’d better ax brother Goshom, you know, sence what 
would it profit ef I gained you or any joy in this world, and then 
come short by settin’ you up fer a idol in my heart ? I don’t 
know whether a New Light is a onbeliever or not, and whether 
I’d be onequally yoked or not. I must ax them as knows bet- 
ter nor I do.” 

“ Well, ef I’m a onbeliever, they’s nobody as could teach me 
to believe quicker’n you could. I never did believe much in 
women folks till 1 believed in you.” 

“ But that’s the sin of it, Jonas. I’d believe in you, and you’d 
believe in me, and we’d be puttin’ our trust in the creatur’ instid 


202 


THE END OF THE WOULD. 


of the Creator, and the Creator is mighty jealous of our idols, 
and He would take us away fer idolatry.” 

“ No, but I wouldn’t worship you, though I’d ruther worship 
you than anybody else ef I was goin’ into the worshipin’ business. 
But you see I a’n’t, honey. I wouldn’t sacrifice to you no lambs 
nor sheep, I wouldn’t pray to you, nor I wouldn’t kiss your shoes, 
like people does the Pope’s. An’ I know you wouldn’t make 
no idol of me like them Greek gods that Andrew’s got picters of. 
I a’n’t handsome enough by a long shot fer a Jupiter or a ’Polio. 
An’ I tell you, Cynthy, ’tain’t no sin to love- Love is the fillfull- 
ing of the law.” 

But Cynthy Ann persisted that she must consult Brother Go- 
shorn, the antiquated class-leader at the cross-roads. Brother 
Goshorn was a good man, but Jonas had a great contempt for 
him. He was a strainer out of gnats, though I do not think he 
swallowed camels. He always stood at the door of the love-feast 
and kept out every woman with jewelry, every girl who had an 
“ artificial ” in her bonnet, every one who wore curls, every man 
whose hair was beyond what he considered the regulation length 
of Scripture, and every woman who wore a veil. In support of 
this last prohibition he quoted Isaiah iii, 23 : “ The glasses and the 
fine linen and the hoods and the veils.” 

To him Cynthy Ann presented the case with much trepida- 
tion. All her hopes for this world hung upon it. But this 
consideration did not greatly affect Brother Goshorn. Hopes and 
joys were as nothing to him where the strictness of discipline 
was involved. The Discipline meant more to a mind of his cast 
than the Decalogue or the Beatitudes. He shook his head. He 
did not know. He must consult Brother Hall. Now, Brother 
Hall was the young preacher traveling his second year, very 


CYNTHY ANN’S sacrifice. 


203 


young and very callow. Ten years of the sharp attritions of 
a Methodist itinerant’s life would take his unworldliness out of 
him and develop his practical sense as no other school in the 
world could develop it. But as yet Brother Hall had not rubbed 
off any of his sanctimoniousness, had not lost any of his belief 
that the universe should be governed on high general princh 
pies with no exceptions. 

So when Brother Goshom informed him that one of his mem- 
bers, Sister Cynthy Ann Dyke, wished to marry, and to marry 
a man that was a New Light, and had asked his opinion, and 
that he did not certainly know whether New Lights were believ- 
ers or not, Brother Hall did not stop to inquire what Jonas 
might be personally. He looked and felt very solemn, and said 
that it was a pity for a Christian to marry a New Light. It 
was clearly a sin, for a New Light was an Arian. And an Arian 
was just as good as an infidel. An Arian robbed Christ of His 
supreme deity, and since he did not worship the Trinity in the 
orthodox sense he must worship a false god. He was an idol- 
ater therefore, and it was a sin to be yoked together with such 
an one. 

Many men more learned than the callow but pious and sin- 
cere Brother Hall have left us in print just such deductions. 

When this decision was communicated to the scrupu- 
lous Cynthy Ann, she folded her hopes as one lays away 
the garment of a dead friend ; she went to her little room 
and prayed ; she offered a sacrifice to God not less costly 
than Abraham’s, and in a like sublime spirit. She watered 
the plant in the old cracked blue-and-white tea-pot, she noticed 
that it was just about to bloom, and then she dropped one 
tear upon it, and because it suggested Jonas in some way. 


204 


the end oe the world, 


she threw it away, resolved not to have any idols in her heart. 
And, doubtless, God received the sacrifice, mistaken and needless 



CYNTHY ANN’S SACRIFICE. 


as it was, a token of the faithfulness of her heart to her duty aa 
she understood it. 


cyntiiy ann’s sacrifice. 


205 


Cynthy Ann explained it all to Jonas in a severe and irrevoc- 
able way. Jonas looked at her a moment, stunned. 

“ Did Brother Goshorn venture to send me any of his wisdom, 
in the way of advice, layin’ round loose, like counterfeit small 
change, cheap as dirt ? ” 

“Well, yes,” said Cynthy Ann, hesitating. 

“ I’ll bet the heft of my fortin’, to be paid on receipt of the 
amount, that I kin tell to a T what the good Christian wanted me 
to do.” 

“ Don’t be oncharitable, Jonas. Brother Goshorn is a mighty 
sincere man.” 

“ So he is, but his bein’ sincere don’t do me no good. He 
wanted you to advise me to jine the Methodist class as a way of 
gittin’ out of the difficulty. And you was too good a Christian 
to ask me to change fer any sech reason, knowin’ I wouldn’t be 
fit for you ef I did.” 

Cynthy Ann was silent. She would have liked to have Jonas 
join the church with her, but if he had done it now she herself 
would have doubted his sincerity. 

“ Now, looky here, Cynthy, ef you’ll say you don’t love me, 
and never can, I’ll leave you to wunst, and fly away and mourn 
like a turtle-dove. But so long as it’s nobody but Goshorn, I’m 
goin’ to stay and litigate the question till the Millerite millennium 
comes. I appeal to Caesar or somebody else. Neither Brother 
Goshorn nor Brother Hall knows enough to settle this question. 
I’m agoin’ to the persidin’ elder. And you can’t try a man and 
hang him and then send him to the penitentiary fer the rest of 
his born days without givin’ him one chance to speak fer his- 
self agin the world and everybody else. I’m goin’ to see the per- 
sidin’ • elder myself and plead my own cause, and ef he goes agin 


206 


THE END OF THE WOULD. 


me, I’ll carry it up to the bishop or the archbishop or the nex’ 
highest man in the heap, till I git plum to the top, and ef they 
all go agin me, I’ll begin over agin at the bottom with Brother 
Goshorn, and keep on till I find a man that’s got common-sense 
enough to salt his religion with.” 


julia’s enterprise. 


207 


CHAPTER XXXII. 


JULIA’S ENTERPRISE. 



UGUST was very sick at the castle. 

This was the first news of his return that 
reached Julia through Jonas and Cynthy Ann. 

But in my interest in Jonas and Cynthy Ann, 
of whom I think a great deal, I forgot to say that 
long before the eyents mentioned in the last chapter, Humphreys 
had been suddenly called away from his peaceful retreat in 
the hill country of Clark township. In fact, the “ important busi- 
ness,” or “ the illness of a friend,” whichever it was, occurred 
the very next day after Norman Anderson’s father returned from 
Louisville, and reported that he had secured for his son an “ out- 
side situation,” that is to say, a place as a collector. 

When he had gone, Jonas remarked to Cynthy Ann, “ Where 
the carcass is, there the turkey-buzzards is gethered. That shinin’ 
example of early piety never plays but one game. That is, fox- 
and-geese. He’s gone after a green goslin’ now, and he’ll find 
him when he’s fattest.” 

But the gentle singing-master had come back from his excur- 
sion, and was taking a profound interest in the coming end of 


208 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


the world. Jonas observed that it “ seemed like as ef he lied 
charge of the whole performance, and meant to shet up the 
sky like a blue cotton umbrell. He’s got a single eye, and it’s 
the same ole game. Fox and geese always, and he’s the fox.” 

Humphreys still lived at Samuel Anderson’s, still devoted 
himself to pleasing Mrs. Abigail, still bowed regretfully to Julia, 
and spoke caressingly to Betsey Malcolm at every opportunity. 

But August was sick at the castle. He was very sick. Every 
morning Dr. Dibrell, a “ calomel-doctor ” — not a steam-doctor— 
rode by the house on his way to Andrew’s, and every morning 
Mrs. Anderson wondered afresh who was sick down that way. 
But the doctor staid so long that Mrs. Abigail made up her mind 
it must be somebody four or five miles away, and so dismissed the 
matter from her mind. For August’s return had been kept secret. 

But Julia noticed, in her heart of hearts, and with ever-in- 
creasing affliction, that the doctor staid longer each day than on 
the day before, and she thought she noticed also an increasing 
anxiety on his face as he rode home again. Her desire to know 
the real truth, and to see August, to do for him, to give her 
life for him, were wearing her away. It is hard to see a friend 
go from you when you have done everything. But to have a 
friend die within your reach, while you are yet unable to help ’ 
him, is the saddest of all. All this anxiety Julia suffered with- 
out even the blessed privilege of showing it. The pent-up fire 
consumed her, and she was at times almost distract. Every morn- 
ing she managed to be on the upper porch when the doctor 
went by, and from the same watch-tower she studied his face 
when he went back. 

Then came a morning when there were two doctors. A phy- 
sician from the county-seat village went by, in company with Dr. 


jitlia’s enterprise. 


209 


Dibrell. So there must be a consultation at the castle. Julia 
knew then that the worst had to be looked in the face. And she 
longed to get away from under the searching black eyes of her 
mother and utter the long-pent cry of anguish. Another day 
of such unuttered pain would drive her clean mad. 

That evening Jonas came over and sought an interview with 
Cynthy Ann. He had not been to see her since his unsuc- 
cessful courtship. Julia felt that he was the bearer of a mes- 
sage. But Mrs. Anderson was in one of her most exacting hu- 
mors, and it gave her not a little pleasure to keep Cynthy Ann, on 
one pretext and another, all the evening at her side. Had Cyn- 
thy Ann been less submissive and scrupulous, she might have 
broken away from this restraint, but in truth she was censuring 
herself for having any backsliding, rebellious wish to talk with 
Jonas after she had imagined the idol cast out of her heart 
entirely. Her conscience was a task-master not less grievous 
than Mrs. Anderson, and, between the two, Jonas had to go away 
without leaving his message. And Julia had to keep her break- 
ing heart in suspense a while longer. 

Why did she not elope long ago and get rid of her mother ? 
Because she was Julia, and being Julia, conscientious, true, and 
filial in spite of her unhappy life, her own character built a wall 
against such a disobedience. Nearly all limitations are inside. 
You could do almost anything if you could give yourself up to 
it. To go in the teeth of one’s family is the one thing that a per- 
son of Julia’s character and habits finds next to impossible. A be- 
neficent limitation of nature ; for the cases in which the judgment 
of a girl of eighteen is better than that of her parents are very few. 
Besides, the inevitable “ heart-disease ” was a specter that guarded 
the gates of Julia’s prison. Night after night she sat looking 


210 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


out over the hills sleeping in hazy darkness, toward the hollow in 
which stood the castle; night after night she had half- formed 
the purpose of visiting August, and then the life-long habit of 
obedience and a certain sense of delicacy held her back. But 
on this night, after the consultation, she felt that she would see 
him if her seeing him brought down the heavens. 

It was a very dark night. She sat waiting for hours — very 
long hours they seemed to her — and then, at midnight, she began 
to get ready to start. 

Only those who have taken such a step can understand the 
pain of deciding, the agony of misgivings in the execution, the 
trembling that Julia felt when she turned the brass knob on the 
front door and lifted the latch — lifted the latch slowly and cau- 
tiously, for it was near the door of her mother’s room — and then 
crept out like a guilty thing into the dark dampness of the night, 
groping her way to the gate, and stumbling along down the road. 
It had been raining, and there was not one star-twinkle in the 
sky ; the only light was that of glow-worms illuminating here 
and there two or three blades of grass by feeble shining. Now 
and then a fire-fly made a spot of light in the blackness, only to 
leave a deeper spot of blackness when he shut off his intermittent 
ray. And when at last Julia found herself at the place where 
the path entered the woods, the blackness ahead seemed still 
more frightful. She had to grope, recognizing every deviation 
from the well-beaten path by the rustle of the dead leaves which 
lay, even in summer, half a foot deep upon the ground. The 
“ fox-fire,” rotting logs glowing with a faint luminosity, startled 
her several times, and the hooting-owl’s shuddering bass — boo ! 
hoo ! hoo-oo-ah-h ! (like the awful keys of the organ whieh 
“touch the spinal cord of the universe”)— sent all her blood 


JULIA’ S ENTERPRISE. 


211 


to her heart. Under ordinary circumstances, she surely would 
not have started at the rustling made by the timid hare in the 
thicket near by. There was no reason why she should shiver 
so when a misstep caused her to scratch her face with the thorny 
twigs of a wild plum-tree. But the effort necessary to the under- 
taking and the agony of the long waiting had exhausted her ner- 
vous force, and she had none left for fortitude. So that when she 
arrived at Andrew’s fence and felt her way along to the gate, and 
heard the hoarse, thunderous baying of his great St. Bernard dog, 
she was ready to faint. But a true instinct makes such a dog 
gallant. It is a vile cur that will harm a lady. Julia walked 
trembling up to the front-door of the castle, growled at by the 
huge black beast, and when the Philosopher admitted her, some 
time after she had knocked, she sank down fainting into a chair. 


/ 


212 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 


THE SECRET STAIRWAY. 


<S6 


bless you, my daughter ! You have given me faith in your sex. 
I have been a lonely man ; a boughless, leafless trunk, shaken by 
the winter winds. But you are my niece. Tou know how to 
be faithful. I am proud of you ! Henceforth I call you my 
daughter. If you were my daughter, you would be to me all 
that Margaret Roper was to Sir Thomas More.” And the shaggy 
man of egotistic and pedantic speech, but of womanly sensi- 
bilities, was weeping. 

The reviving Julia begged to know how August was. 

“ Ah, constant heart ! And he is constant as 3-ou arc. Noble 
fellow ! I will not deceive you. The doctors think that he will 
not live more than twenty -four hours. But he is only dying to 
see you, now. Your coming may revive him. We sent for 
you this morning by Jonas, hoping you might escape and come 


bless you ! ” said Andrew as he handed 
her a gourd of water to revive her. “You are 
as faithful as Hero. You are another Heloise. 
You are as brave as the Maid of Orleans. I will 
never say that women are unfaithful again. God 




THE SECRET STAIRWAY. 


213 


in some way. But Jonas could not get his message to you. 
Some angel must have brought you. It is an augury of good.” 

The hopefulness of Andrew sprang out of his faith in an 
ideal, right outcome. Julia could not conceal from herself the 
fact that his opinion had no ground. But in such a strait as 
hers, she could not help clinging even to this support. 

Andrew was a little perplexed. How to take Julia up-stairs? 
Mrs. Wehle and Wilhelmina and the doctor went in regularly, 
not by the rope-ladder, but by a more secure wooden one which 
he had planted against the outside of the house. But Andrew 
had suddenly conceived so exalted an opinion of his niece’s 
virtues that he was unwilling to lead her into the upper story in 
that fashion. His imagination had invested her with all the glo- 
ries of all the heroines, from Penelope to Beatrice, and from 
Beatrice to Scott’s Rebecca. At last a sudden impulse seized 
him. 

“ My dear daughter, they say that genius is to madness close 
allied. When I built this house I was in a state bordering on 
insanity, I suppose. I pleased my whims — my whims were my 
only company — I pleased my whims in building an American 
castle. These whims begin to seem childish to me now. I put 
in a secret stairway. No human foot but my own has ever trod- 
den it. August, whom I love more than any other, and who 
is one of the few admitted to my library, has always ascended 
by the rope-ladder. But you are my niece ; I would you were 
my daughter. I will signalize my reverence for you by showing 
up the stairway the woman who knows how to love and be faith- 
ful, the feet that would be worthy of golden steps if I had them. 
Come.” 

Spite of her grief and anxiety, Julia was impressed and op- 


214 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


pressed with the reverence shown her by her uncle. She had a 
veneration almost superstitious for the Philosopher’s learning. 
She was not accustomed to even respectful treatment, and to be 
worshiped in this awful way by such a man was something 
almost as painful as it was pleasant. 

The entrance to the stairway, if that could be called a stairway 
which was as difficult of ascent as a ladder, was through a closet 
by the side of the donjon chimney, and the logs had been so ar- 
ranged without and within that the space occupied by the nar- 
row and zigzag stairs was not apparent. Up these stairs he took 
Julia, leaving her in a closet above. As this closet was situated 
alongside the chimney, it opened, of course, into the small comer 
room which I have before described, and in which August was 
now lying. Andrew descended the stairs and entered the upper 
story again by the outside ladder. He thought best to prepare 
August for the coming of Julia, lest joy should destroy a life 
that was so far wasted. 


THE INTERVIEW, 


215 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 


THE INTERVIEW. 



rE left August on that summer day on the 
levee at Louisville without employment. He 
was not exactly disheartened, but he was home- 
sick. That he was forbidden to go back by 
threats of prosecution for his burglarious manner 
of entering Samuel Anderson’s house was reason enough for 
wanting to go ; that his father’s family were not yet free from 
danger was a stronger reason ; but strongest of all, though he 
blushed to own it to himself, was the longing to be where he 
might perchance sometimes see the face he had seen that spring 
morning in the bottom of a sun-bonnet. Right manfully did he 
fight against his discouragement and his homesickness, and his 
longing to see Julia. It was better to stay where he was. It was 
better not to go back beaten. If he surrendered so easily, he 
would never put himself into a situation where he could claim 
Julia with self-respect. He would stay and make his way in 
the world somehow. But making his way in the world did not 
seem half so easy now as it had on that other morning in March 
when he stood in the bam talking to Julia. Making your for- 
tune always seems so easy until you’ve tried it. It seems rather 


216 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


easy in a novel, and still easier in a biography. But no Sami j 
Smiles ever writes the history of those who fail ; the vessels th^it 
never came back from their venturous voyages left us no 
log-books. Many have written the History of Success. What 
melancholy Plutarch shall arise to record, with a pen dipped in 
wormwood, the History of Failure ? 

No! he would not go back defeated. August said this over 
bravely, but a little too often, and with a less resolute tone at 
each repetition. He contemned himself for his weakness, and 
tried, but tried in vain, to form other plans. Had he known 
how much one’s physical state has to do with one’s force of 
character, he might have guessed that he did not deserve the 
blame he meted out to himself. He might have remembered 
what Shakespeare’s Portia says to Brutus, that “humour hath 
his hour with every man.” But with a dull and unaccountable 
aching in his head and back he compromised with himself. He 
would go to the castle and pass a day or two. Then he would 
return and fight it out. 

So he got on the packet Isaac Shelby, and was soon shaking 
with a chill that showed how thoroughly malaria had pervaded 
his system. His very bones seemed frozen. But if you ever 
shook with such a chill, or rather if you were ever shaken by 
such a chill, taking hold of you like a demoniacal possession ; 
if you ever felt your brain congealing, your icy bones breaking, 
your frosty heart becoming paralyzed, with a cold no fire could 
reach, you know what it is; and if you have not felt it, no 
words of mine can make you understand the sensations. After 
the chill came the period when August felt himself between two 
parts of Milton’s hell, between a sea of ice and a sea of fire; 
sometimes the hot wave scorched him, then it retired again before 


THE INTERVIEW. 


217 


the icy one. At last it was all hot, and the boiling blood scalded 
his palms and steamed to his brain, bewildering his thoughts 
and almost blinding his eyes. He had determined when he 
started to get off at a wood-yard three miles below Andrew’s 
castle, to avoid observation and the chance of arrest ; and now 
in his delirium the purpose as he had planned it remained fixed. 
He got up at two o’clock, crazed with fever, dressed himself, and 
went out into the rainy night. He went ashore in the mud 
and bushes, and, guided more by instinct than by any conscious 
thought, he started up the wagon-track along the river bank. 
His furious fever drove him on, talking to himself, and splashing 
recklessly into the pools of rain-water standing in the road. 
He never remembered his debarkation. He must have fallen once 
or twice, for he was covered with mud when he rang the alarm 
at the castle. In answer to Andrew’s “Who’s there?” he 
answered, “ You’ll have to send a harder rain than that if you 
want to put this fire out!” 

An d so, what with the original disease, the mental discourage- 
ment, and the exposure to the rain, the fever had well-nigh con- 
sumed the life, and now that the waves of the hot sea after days 
of fire and nights of delirium had gone back, there was hardly 
any life left in the body, and the doctors said there was no 
hope. One' consuming desire remained. He wanted to see Julia 
once before he went away ; and that one desire it seemed impos- 
sible to gratify. When he learned of the failure of Jonas to get 
any message to Julia through Cynthy, he had felt the keenest 
disappointment, and had evidently been sinking since the hope 
that kept him up had been taken away. 

The mother sat by his bed, Gottlieb sat stupefied at the foot, 
with Jonas by his side, and Wilhelmina was crying in a still 


218 THE END OP THE WORLD. 

fashion in one corner of the room. August lay breathing 
feebly, and with his life evidently ebbing. 

“August!” said Andrew, as he stood over his bed, having 
come to announce the arrival of Julia. “ August ! ” Andrew 
tried to speak quietly, but there was a something of hope in the 
inflection, a tremor of eagerness in the utterance, that made the 
mother look up quickly and inquiringly 

August opened his eyes slowly and looked into the face of the 
Philosopher. Then he slowly closed his eyes again, and a some- 
thing, not a smile — he was too weak for that — bu£ a look of 
infinite content, spread over his wan face. 

“ I know,” he whisperd. 

“Know what?” asked Andrew, leaning down to catch his 
words. 

“Julia.” And a single tear crept out from under the closed 
lid. The tender mother wiped it away. 

After resting a moment, August looked up at Andrew’s face 
inquiringly. 

“She is coming,” said the Philosopher. 

August smiled very faintly, but Andrew was sure he smiled, 
and again leaned down his ear. 

“ She is here,” whispered August ; “ I heard Charon bark, and 
I — saw — your — face.” 

Andrew now stepped to the closet-door and opened it, and 
Julia came out. 

“ Blamed ef he a’n’t a witch ! ” whispered Jonas. “ Cunjures 
a angel out of his cupboard ! ” 

Julia did not see anybody or anything but the white and 
wasted face upon the pillow. The eyes were now closed again, 
and she quickly crossed the floor, and— not without a faint 


THE INTERVIEW. 


219 


maidenly blush — stooped and kissed the parched lips, from which 
the life seemed already to have fled. 

And August with difficulty disengaged his wasted hand from 
the cover, and laid his nerveless fingers — alas! like a skeleton’s 
now — in the warm hand of Julia, and said— she leaned down to 
listen, as he whispered feebly through his dry lips out of a full 
heart — “Thank God !” 

And the Philosopher, catching the words, said audibly, 
“ Amen ! ” 

And the mother only wept. 


7 * 


22 0 


THE END OE THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXXV. 


GETTING READY EOR THE END. 



OW Julia spent two hours of blessed sadness 
at the castle; how August slept peacefully for 
five minutes at a time with his hand in hers, and 
then awoke and looked at her, and then slum- 
bered again; how she moistened his parched lips 
for him, and gave him wine ; how at last she had to bid him 
a painful farewell; how the mother gave her a benediction 
in German and a kiss ; how Wilhelmina clung to her with 
tears; how Jonas called her a turtle-dove angel; how Brother 
Hall, the preacher who had been sent for at the mother’s request, 
to converse with the dying man, spoke a few consoling words to 
her ; how Gottlieb confided to Jonas his intention never to 
“ sprach nodin ’pout Yangee kirls no more;” and how at last 
Uncle Andrew walked home with her, I have not time to tell- 
When the Philosopher bade her adieu, he called her names 
which she did not understand. But she turned back to him, 
and after a minute’s hesitation, spoke huskily. “ Uncle Andrew 
if he — if he should get worse — I want ” 


GETTING READY FOR THE END. 


221 


“ I know, my daughter ; you want him to die your husband ? ” 

“ Yes, if he wishes it. Send for me day or night, and I’ll 
come in spite of everybody.” 

“ God bless you, my daughter ! ” said Andrew. And he 
watched until she got safely into the house without discovery, and 
then he went back satisfied and proud. 

Of course August died, and Julia devoted herself to philan- 
thropic labors. It is the fashion now for novels to end thus 
sadly, and you would not have me be out of the fashion. 

But August did not die. Joy is a better stimulant than wine. 
Love is the best tonic in the pharmacopeia. And from the hour 
in which August Wehle looked into the eyes of Julia, the tide of 
life set back again. Not perceptibly at first. For two days he 
was neither better nor worse. But this was a gain. Then slowly 
he came back to life. But at Andrew’s instance he kept in- 
doors while Humphreys staid. 

Humphreys, on his part, like Ananias, pretended to have 
disposed of all his property, paid his debts, reserved enough to 
live on until the approaching day of doom, and given the 
rest to the poor of the household of faith, and there were several 
others who were sincere enough to do what he only pretended. 
Among the leading Adventists was “Dr.” Ketchup, who still 
dealt out corn-sweats and ginseng-tea, but who refused to sell 
his property. He excused himself by quoting the injunction, 
“ Occupy till I come.” But others sold their estates for trifles, 
and gave themselves up to proclaiming the millennium. 

Mrs. Abigail Anderson was a woman who did nothing by 
halves. She was vixenish, she was selfish, she was dishonest and 
grasping ; but she was religious. If any man think this paradox 
impossible, he has observed character superficially. There are 


222 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


criminals in State’s-prison who have been very devout all their 
lives. Religious questions took hold of Mrs. Anderson’s whole 
nature. She was superstitious, narrow, and intense. She was 
as sure that the day of judgment would be proclaimed on the 
eleventh of August, 1843, as she was of her life. No considera- 
tion in opposition to any belief of hers weighed a feather with 
her. Her will mastered her judgment and conscience. 

And so she determined that Samuel must sell his property 
for a trifle. How far she was influenced in this by a sincere 
desire to square all outstanding debts before the final settlement, 
how far by a longing to be considered the foremost and most 
pious of all, and how far by business shrewdness based on that 
feeling which still lurks in the most protestant people, that such 
sacrifices do improve their state in a future world, I can not 
tell. Doubtless fanaticism, hypocrisy, and a self-interest that 
looked sordidly even at heaven, mingled in bringing about the 
decision. At any rate, the property was to be sold for a few 
hundred dollars. 

Getting wind of this decision, Andrew promptly appeared 
at his brother’s house and offered to buy it. But Mrs. Abigail 
couldn’t think of it. Andrew had always been her enemy, and 
though she forgave him, she would not on any account sell 
him an inch of the land. It would not be right. He had claimed 
that part of it belonged to him, and to let him have it would be 
to admit his claim. 

“ Andrew,” she said, “ you do not believe in the millennium, 
and people say that you are a skeptic. You want to cheat us out 
of what you think a Valuable piece of property. And you’ll find 
yourself at the last judgment with the weight of this sin on 
your heart. You will, indeed ! ” 


GETTING READY FOR THE END. 


223 


“How clearly you reason about other people's duty!” said 
the Philosopher. “ If you had seen your own duty half so 
clearly, some of us would have been better off, and your account 
would have been straighter.” 

Here Mrs. Anderson grew very angry, and vented her spleen 
in a solemn exhortation to Andrew to get ready for the coming 
of the Master, not three weeks off at the farthest, and she warned 
him that the archangel might blow his trumpet at any moment. 
Then where would he be? she asked in exultation. Human 
meanness is never so pitiful as when it tries to seize on God’s 
judgments as weapons with which to gratify its own spites. I 
trust this remark will not be considered as applying only to Mrs. 
Anderson. 

But Mrs. Anderson fired off all the heavenly small-shot she 
could find in the teeth and eyes of Andrew, and then, to prevent 
a rejoinder, she told him it was time for her to go to secret 
prayer, and she only stopped upon the threshold to send back 
one Parthian arrow in the shape of a warning to “ watch and 
be ready.” 

I wonder if a certain class of religious people have evef 
thought how much their exclusiveness and Pharisaism have to do 
with the unhappy fruitlessness of all their appeals ! Had Mrs. 
Anderson been as blameless as an angel, such exhortations would 
have driven a weaker than Andrew to hate the name of religion. 

But I must not moralize, for Mr. Humphreys has already 
divulged his plan of disposing of the property. He has a 
friend, one Thomas A. Parkins, who has money, and who will 
buy the farm at two hundred dollars. He could procure the 
money in advance any day by going to the village of Bethany, 
the county-seat, and drawing on Mr. Parkins, and cashing the 


224 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


draft. It was a matter of indifference to him, he said, only 
that he would like to oblige so good a friend. 

This arrangement, by which the Anderson farm was to be sold 
for a song to some distant stranger, pleased Mrs. Abigail. She 
could not bear that one of her unbelieving neighbors should even 
for a fortnight rejoice in a supposed good bargain at her expense. 
To sell to Mr. Humphreys’s friend in Louisville was just the 
thing. When pressed by some of her neighbors who had not re- 
ceived the Adventist gospel, to tell on what principle she could 
justify her sale of the farm at all, she answered that if the farm 
would not be of any account after the end of the world, neither 
would the money. 

Mr. Humphreys went down to the town of Bethany and came 
back, affecting to have cashed a draft on his friend for two hun- 
dred dollars. The deeds were drawn, and a justice of the peace 
was to come the next morning and take the acknowledgment of 
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. 

This was what Jonas learned as he sat in the kitchen talking 
to Cynthy Ann. He had come to bring some message from the 
convalescent August, and had been detained by the attraction 
of adhesion. 

“ I told you it was fox-and-geese. Didn’t I ? And so Thomas 
A. Parkins is his name. Gus Wehle said he’d bet the two was 
one. Well, I must drive this varmint off afore he gits his 
chickens.’* 


THE SIN OF SANCTIMONY, 


225 


CHAPTER XXXVX 


THE SIN OF SANCTIMONY. 



1 ^UST at this point arrived Mr. Hall, whom I have 
before described as the good but callow Meth- 
odist preacher on the circuit. Some people think that 
a minister of the gospel should be exempt from criti- 
cism, ridicule, and military duty. But the manly min- 
ister takes his lot with the rest. Nothing could be more pernicious 
than making the foibles of a minister sacred. Doubtless Mr. 
Hall has long since come to laugh at his own early follies, his 
official sanctimoniousness, and all that ; and why should not I, 
who have been a callow circuit-preacher myself in my day, 
laugh at my Brother Hall, for the good of his kind ? 

He had come to visit Sister Cynthy Ann, whose name had 
long stood on the class-book at Harden’s Cross-Roads as a good 
and acceptable member of the church in full connection. He was 
visiting formally and officially each family in which there was a 
member. Had he visited informally and unofficially, and like a 
man instead of like a minister, he would have done more good. 
But he came to Samuel Anderson’s, and informed Mrs. Anderson 
that he was visiting his members, and that as one of her house- 


226 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


hold was a member, he would like to have a little religious con- 
versation and prayer with the family. Would she please gather 
them together? 

So Julia was called down-stairs, and Jonas was invited in 
from the kitchen. The sight of him distressed Brother Hall. 
For was not this New Light sent here by Satan to lead astray 
one of his flock ? But, at least, he would labor faithfully with 
him. 

He began with Mr. Samuel Anderson. But that worthy, after 
looking at his wife in vain for a cue, darted off about the trum- 
pets of the Apocalypse. 

“Mr. Anderson, as head of this family, your responsibility 
is very great. Ho you feel the full assurance, my brother?’ 
asked Mr. Hall. 

“ Yes,” said Mr. Anderson, “ I am standing with my lamp 
trimmed and ready. I am listening for the midnight shout. To- 
night the trumpet may sound. I am afraid you don’t do your 
duty, or you would lift up your voice. The time and times and 
a half are almost out.” 

Mr. Hall was a little dashed at this. A man whose religious 
conversation is of a set and conventional type, is always shocked 
and jostled when he is thrown from the track. And he him- 
self, like everybody else, had felt the Adventist infection, and 
did not want to commit himself. So he turned to Mrs. Ander- 

son. She answered like a seraph every question put to her the 

conventional questions never pierce the armor of a hypocrite or 
startle the conscience of a self-deceiver. Mr. Hall congratu- 
lated her in his most official tone (a compound of authority, 
awfulness, and sanctity) on her deep experience of the things that 
made for her everlasting peace. He told her that people of her 



227 A PASTORAL VISIT, 




THE SIN OF SANCTIMONY. 


229 


high attainments must beware of spiritual pride. And Mrs. An- 
derson took the warning with beautiful meekness, sinking into 
forty fathoms of undisguised and rather ostentatious humility, 
heaving solemn sighs in token of self-reproach — a self-reproach 
that did not penetrate the cuticle. 

“ And you, Sister Cynthy Ann,” he said, fighting shy of Jonas 
for the present, “I trust you are trying to let your light shine. 
Do you feel that you are pressing on?” 

Poor Cynthy Ann sank into a despondency deeper than usual 
She was afeard not. Seemed like as ef her heart was cold 
and dead to God. Seemed like as ef she couldn’t no ways gin 
up the world. It weighed her down like a rock, and many was 
the fight she had with the enemy. No, she wuzn’t getting on. 

“ My dear sister,” said Mr. Hall, “ let me warn you. Here is 
Mrs. Anderson, who has given up the world entirely. I hope 
you’ll follow so good an example. Do not be led astray by 
worldly affections ; they are sure to entrap you. I am afraid you 
have not maintained your steadfastness as you should.” Here 
Mr. Hall’s eye wandered doubtfully to Jonas, of whom he felt 
a little afraid. Jonas, on his part, had no reason to like Mr. 
Hall for his advice in Cynthy’s love affair, and now the minister’s 
praises of Mrs. Anderson and condemnation of Cynthy Ann 
had not put him in any mood to listen to exhortation. 

“Well, Mr. Harrison,” said the young minister solemnly, 
approaching Jonas much as a dog does a hedgehog, “how do 
you feel to-day ? ” 

“ Middlin’ peart, I thank you ; how’s yourself ? ” 

This upset the good man not a little, and convinced him that 
Jonas was in a state of extreme wickedness. 

“ Are you a Christian ? ” 


230 


THE ENl> OF THE WOELt). 


“ Wal, I ’low I am. How about yourself, Mr. Hall?” 

“I believe you are a New Light. Now, do you believe in the 
Lord Jesus Christ?” asked the minister in an annihilating tone. 

“ Yes, I do, my aged friend, a heap sight more’n I do in some 
of them that purtends to hev a paytent right on all his blessins, 
and that put on solemn airs and call other denominations hard 
names. My friend, I don’t believe in no religion that’s made up 
of sighs and groaas and high temper ” (with a glance at Mrs. An- 
derson), “ and that thinks a good deal mere of its bein’ sound in 
doctrine than of the danger of bein’ rotten in life. They’s lots o* 
bad eggs got slick and shiny shells ! ” 

Mr. Hall happened to think just here of the injunction against 
throwing pearls before swine, and so turned to Humphreys, who 
made his heart glad by witnessing a good confession, in soft 
and unctuous tones, and couched in . the regulation phrases which 
have worn smooth i:i long use. 

Julia had slunk away in a comer. But now he appealed to 
her also. 

“ Blest with a praying mother, you, Miss Anderson, ought to 
repent of your sins and flee from the wrath to come. You know 
the right way. You have been pointed to it by the life of your 
parents from childhood. Reared in the bosom of a Christian 
household, let me entreat you to seek salvation immediately.” 

I do not like to repeat this talk here. But it is an unfor- 
tunate fact that goodness and self-sacrificing piety do not always 
go with practical wisdom. The novelist, like the historian, must 
set down things as he finds them. A man who talks in conse- 
crated phrases is yet in the poll-parrot state of mental development. 

“Do you feel a desire to flee from the wrath to come?” 
he asked 


THE SIN OF SANCTIMONY. 


53l 


Julia gave some sort of inaudible assent. 

“ My dear young sister, you have great reason to be thankful- 
very great reason for gratitude to Almighty God.” (Like many 
other pious young men, Mr. Hall said Gawd.) “ I met you the 
other night at your uncle’s. The young man whose life we then 
despaired of has recovered.” And with more of this, Mr. Hall 
told Julia’s secret, while Mrs. Anderson, between her anger and 
her rapt condition of mind, seemed to be petrifying. 

I trust the reader does not expect me to describe the feelings 
of Julia while Mr. Hall read a chapter and prayed. Nor the 
emotions of Mrs. Anderson/ I think if Mr. Hall could have 
heard her grind her teeth while he in his prayer gave thanks for 
the recovery of August, he would not have thought so highly 
of her piety. But she managed to control her emotions until 
the minister was fairly out of the house. In bidding good-by, 
Mr. Hall saw how pale and tremulous Julia was, and with his 
characteristic lack of sagacity, he took her emotion to be a sign 
of religious feeling, and told her he was pleased to see that she 
was awakened to a sense of her condition. 

And then he left. And then came the deluge. 


232 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXXVn. 

THE DELUGE. 

f -^HE indescribable deluge! But, after all, the worst 
of anything of that sort is the moment before it 
begins. A plunge-bath, a tooth-pulling, an amputa- 
tion, and a dress-party are all worse in anticipation 
than in the moment of infliction. Julia, as she stood 
busily sticking a pin in the window-sash, waiting for her mother 
to begin, wished that the storm might burst, and be done with it. 
But Mrs. Anderson understood her business too well for that. 
She knew the value of the awful moments of silence before be- 
ginning. She had not practiced all her life without learning the 
fine art of torture in its exquisite details. I doubt not the black- 
robed fathers of the Holy Office were leisurely gentlemen, giv- 
ing their victims plenty of time for anticipatory meditation, 
laying out their utensils quietly, inspecting the thumb-screw 
affectionately to make sure that it would work smoothly, dis- 
cussing the rack and wheel with much tender forethought, as 
though torture were a sweet thing, to be reserved like a little 
girl’s candy lamb, and only resorted to when the appetite has 


THE HELTJGE. 


238 


been duly whetted by contemplation. I never had the pleasure 
of knowing an inquisitor, and I can not certify that they were of 
this deliberate fashion. But it “ stands to nature ” that they were. 
For the vixens who are vixens of the highest quality, are always 
deliberate. 

Mrs. Anderson felt that the piece of invective which she 
was about to undertake, was not to be taken in hand unad- 
visedly, “but reverently, discreetly, and in the fear of God.” 
And so she paused, and Julia fumbled the tassel of the win- 
dow-curtain, and trembled with the chill of expectation. And 
Mrs. Abigail continued to debate how she might make this, 
which would doubtless be her last outburst before the day of 
judgment, her masterpiece — worthy song of the dying swan. 
And then she hoped, she sincerely hoped, to be able by this 
awful coup de main to awaken Julia to a sense of her sinfulness. 
For there was such a jumble of mixed motives in her mind, that 
one could never distinguish her sincerity from her hypocrisy. 

Mrs. Anderson’s conscience was quite an objective one. As 
Jonas often remarked, “ she had a feelin’ sense of other folkses 
unworthiness.” And the sins which she appreciated were gener- 
ally sins against herself. Julia’s disobedience to herself was 
darker in her mind than murder committed on anybody else 
would have been. And now she sat deliberating, not on the 
limit of the verbal punishment she meant to inflict — that gave 
her no concern — but on her ability to do the matter justice. 
Even as a tyrannical backwoods school-master straightens his long 
beech-rod relishfully before applying it. 

Not that Mrs. Anderson was silent all this time. She was 
sighing and groaning in a spasmodic devotion. She was “ seek- 
ing strength from above to do her whole duty,” she would have 


234 


THE END OP THE WOKLD. 


told you. She was “agonizing” in prayer for her daughter, 
and she contrived that her stage-whisper praying should now and 
then reach the ears of its devoted object. Humphreys remained 
seated, pretending to read the copy of “ Josephus,” but watching 
the coming storm with the interest of a connoisseur. And while 
he remained Jonas determined to stay, to keep Julia in coun- 
tenance, and he beckoned to Cynthy to stay also. And Samuel 
Anderson, who loved his daughter and feared his wife, fled 
like a coward from the coming scene. Everybody expected Mrs. 
Anderson to break out like a fury. 

But she knew a better plan than that. She felt a new de- 
vice come like an inspiration. And perhaps it was. It really 
seemed to Jonas that the devil helped her. For instead of break- 
ing out into commonplace scolding, the resources of which she 
had long since exhausted, she dropped upon her knees, and 
began to pray for Julia. 

No swearer ever curses like the priest who veils his personal 
spites in official and pious denunciations, and Mrs. Anderson had 
never dealt out abuse so roundly and terribly and crushingly, as 
She did under the guise of praying for the salvation of Julia’s 
soul from well-deserved perdition. But Abigail did not say per- 
dition. She left that to weak spirits. She thought it a virtue 
to say “hell” with unction and emphasis, by way of alarming 
the consciences of sinners. Mrs. Anderson’s prayer is not re- 
portable. That sort of profanity is too bad to write. She 
capped her climax — even as I have heard a revivalist pray for a 
scoffer that had vexed his righteous soul — by asking God to con- 
vert her daughter, or if she could not be converted to take her 
away, that she might not heap up wrath against the day of wrath. 
For that sort of religious excitement which does not quiet the 


TIIE DELUGE. 


235 


evil passions, seems to inflame them, and Mrs. Anderson was not 
in any right sense sane. And the prayer was addressed more to 
the frightened Julia than to God. She would have been terribly 
afflicted had her petition been granted. 

Julia would have run away from the admonition which fob 
lowed the prayer, had it not been that Mrs. Anderson adroitly 
put it under cover of a religious exhortation. She besought 
Julia to repent, and then, affecting to show her her sinful- 
ness, she proceeded to abuse her. 

Had Julia no temper ? Yes, she had doubtless a spice of her 
mother’s anger without her meanness. She would have resisted, 
but that from childhood she had felt paralyzed by the utter use- 
lessness of all resistance. The bravest of the villagers at the foot 
of Vesuvius never dreamed of stopping the crater’s mouth. 

But, happily, at last Mrs. Anderson’s insane wrath went a little 
too far. 

“ You poor lost sinner,” she said, “ to think you should go to 
destruction under my very eyes, disgracing us all, by running 
over the country at night with bad men ! But there’s mercy 
even for such as you.” 

Julia would not have understood the full meaning of this as- 
persion of her purity, had she not caught Humphreys’s eye. His 
expression, half sneer, half leer, seemed to give her mother’s say- 
ing its full interpretation. She put out her hand. She turned 
white, and said : “ Say one word more, and I will go away from 
you and never come back ! Never ! ” And then she sat down and 
cried, and then Mrs. Anderson’s maternal love, her “unloving 
love,” revived. To have her daughter leave her, too, would be a 
sort of defeat. She hushed, and sat down in her splint-bottomed 
rocking-chair, which snapped when she rocked, and which seemed 


236 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


to speak for her after she had shut her mouth. Her face settled 
into a martyr-like appeal to Heaven in proof of the justice of her 
cause. And then she fell back on her forlorn hope. She wept 
hysterically, in sincere self-pity, to think that an affectionate 
mother should have such a daughter! 

Julia, finding that her mother had desisted, went to her room. 
She did not exactly pray, but she talked to herself as she paced 
the floor. It was a monologue, and yet there was a conscious 
appeal to an invisible Presence, who could not misjudge her, and 
so she passed from talking to herself to talking to God, and that 
without any of the formality of prayer. Her mother had made 
God seem to be against her. Now she, like David, protested her 
innocence to God. She recited half to herself, and yet also to 
God — for is not every appeal to one’s conscience in some sense 
an appeal to God ? — she recited all the struggles of that night 
when she went to August at the castle. People talk of the con- 
solation there is in God’s mercy. But Julia found comfort in 
God’s justice. He could not judge her wrongly 

Then she opened the Testament at the old place, and read 
the words long since fixed in her memory. And then she — 
weary and heavy laden — came again to Him who invites, and 
found rest. And then she found, as many another has found, 
that coming to God is not, as theorists will have it, a coming once 
for a lifetime, but a coming oft and ever repeated. 

Jonas and Cynthy Ann retired to the kitchen, and the former 
said in his irreverent way, “ Blamed ef Abigail ha’nt got more 
devils into her’n Mary Magdalene had the purtiest day she ever 
seed ! I should think, arter a life with her fer a mother, the bad 
place would be a healthy and delightful clime. The devil a’n’t 
a patchin’ to her.” 


v 


THE DELUGE. 


23? 


“Don’t, Jonas; you talk so cur’us, like as ef you was kinder 
sorter wicked.” 

“That’s jest what I am, my dear, but Abigail Anderson’s 
wicked without the kinder sorter. She cusses when she’s a- 
prayin’. She cusses that poar gal right in the Lord’s face. 
Good by, I must go. Smells so all-fired like brimstone about 
here.” This last was spoken in an undertone of indignant 
soliloquy, as he crossed the threshold of Cynthy’s clean kitchen. 


238 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 


SCARING A HAWK. 



JONAS was thoroughly alarmed. He exagger- 
ated the harm that Humphreys might do to 
August, now that he knew where he was. Au- 
gust, on his part, felt sure that Humphreys would 
not do anything against him ; certainly not in the 
way of legal proceedings. And as for the sale of Samuel 
Anderson’s farms, that did not disturb him. Like almost 
everybody else at that time, August Wehle was strongly im- 
pressed by the assertions of the Millerites, and if the world 
should be finished in the next month, the farms were of 
no consequence. And if Millerism proved a delusion, the loss 
of Samuel Anderson’s property would only leave Julia on his 
level, so far as worldly goods went. The happiness this last 
thought brought him made him ashamed. Why should he 
rejoice in Mr. Anderson’s misfortune? Why should he wish 


SCARING A HAWK. 


239 


to pull Julia down to him? But still the thought re- 
mained a pleasant one. 

Jonas would not have it so. He had his plan. He went 
home from the Adventist meeting that very night with Cynthy 
Ann, and then stood talking to her at the corner of the 
porch, feeling very sure that Humphreys would listen from 
above. He heard his stealthy tread, after a while, disturb a 
loose board on the upper porch. Then he began to talk to 
Cynthy Ann in this strain : 

“You see, I Can’t tell no secrets, Cynthy Ann, even to 
your Royal Goodness, as I might say, seein’ as how as you 
a’n’t my wife, and a’n’t likely to be, if Brother Goshom can 
have his way. But you’re the Queen of Hearts, anyhow. 
But s’pose I was to hint a secret?” 

“ Sh — sh — h-h-h ! ” said Cynthy Ann, partly because she felt 
a sinful pleasure in the flattery, and partly because she felt 
sure that Humphreys was above. But Jonas paid no attention 
to the caution. 

“ I’ll gin you a hint as strong as a Irishman’s, which they 
do say’ll knock you down. Let’s s’pose a case. They a’n’t 
no harm in s’posin’ a case, you know. I’ve knowed boys 
who’d throw a rock at a fence-rail and hit a stump, and then 
say, ‘ S’posin’ they was a woodpecker on that air stump, 
wouldn’t I a keeled him over?’ You can s’pose a case and 
make a woodpecker wherever you want to. Well, s’posin’ 
they was a inquisition or somethin’ of the kind from the 
guv’nor of the State of ole Kaintuck to the guv’nor of the 
State of Injeanny? And s’posin’ that the dokyment got lodged 
in this ’ere identical county ? And s’posin’ it called fer the 
body of one Thomas A. Parkins, afo'as J. W. ’Umphreys? 


240 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


And s’posin’ it speecified as to sartain and sundry crimes com- 
mitted in Paduky and all along the shore, fer all I know? 
Now, s’posin’ all of them air things, what would Clark town- 
ship do to console itself when that toonful v’ice and them air 
blazin’ watch-seals had set in ignominy for ever and ever? 
Selah ! Good-night, and don’t you breathe a word to a livin’ 
soul, nur a dead one, ’bout what I been a-sayin’. You’ll know 
more by daylight to-morry ’n you know now.” 

And the last part of the speech was true, for by midnight 
the Hawk had fled. And the sale of the Anderson farm to 
Humphreys was never completed. For three days the end of 
the world was forgotten in the interest which Clark township 
felt in the flight of its favorite. And by degrees the story 
of Norman’s encounter with the gamblers and of August’s re- 
covery of the money became spread abroad through the con- 
fidential hints of Jonas. And by degrees another story became 
known; it could not long be concealed. It was the story of 
Betsey Malcolm, who averred that she had been privately 
married to Humphreys on the occasion of a certain trip they 
had made to Kentucky together, to attend a “ big meeting.” 
The story was probably true, but uncharitable gossips shook 
their heads. 

It was only a few evenings after the flight of Humphreys 
that Jonas had another talk with Cynthy Ann, in which he 
confessed that all his supposed case about a requisition from 
the governor of Kentucky for Humphreys’s arrest was pure 
fiction. 

“But, Jonas, is— is that air right? I’m afeard it a’n’t right 
to tell an ontruth.” 

“ So ’ta’n’t ; but I only s’posed a case, you know.” 


SCARING A HAWK. 


241 


“But Brother Hall said last Sunday two weeks, that any- 
thing that gin a false impression was — was lying. Now, I 
don’t think you meant it, but then I thought I orto speak to 
you about it.” 

“ Well, maybe you’re right. I see you last summer a-puttin’ 
up a skeercrow to keep the poor, hungry little birds of the 
air from gittin’ the peas that they needed to sustain life. An’ 
I said, What a pity that the best woman I ever seed should 
tell lies to the poor little birds that can’t defend theirselves 
from her wicked wiles ! But I see that same day a skeer- 
crow, a mean, holler, high-percritical purtense of a ole hat 
and coat, a-hanging in Brother Goshorn’s garden down to the 
cross-roads. An’ I wondered ef it was your Methodis’ trainin’ 
that taught you sech-like cheatin’ of the little sparrys and 
blackbirds.” 

“Yes; but Jonas ” said Cynthy, bewildered. 

“ And I see a few days arterwards a Englishman with a 
humbug-fly onto his line, a foolin’ the poor, simple-hearted 
little fishes into swallcrin’ a hook that hadn’t nary sign of a 
ginowine bait onto it. An’ I says, says I, What a deceitful 
thing the human heart is ! ” 

u Why, Jonas, you’d make a preacher!” said Cynthy Ann, 
touched with the fervor of his utterance, and inly resolved 
never to set up another scarecrow. 

“ Not much, my dear. But then, you see, I make distinc- 
tions. Ef I was to see a wolf a-goin’ to eat a lamb, what 
would I do ? Why, I’d skeer or fool him with the very fust 
thing I could find. Wouldn’ you, honey?” 

“In course,” said Cynthy Ann. 

“ And so, when I seed a wolf or a tiger or a painter, like 


242 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


that air ’Umphreys, about to gobble up fortins, and to do some 
harm to Gus, maybe, I jest rigged up a skeercrow of words, 
like a ole hat and coat stuck onto a stick, and run him off. 
Any harm done, my dear ? ” 

“ Well, no, Jonas ; I rather ’low not.” 

Whether Jonas’s defense was good or not, I can not say, for 
I do not know. But he is entitled to the benefit of it 


JONAS TAKES AN APPEAL. 


243 


CHAPTER XXXIX. 


JONAS TAKES AN APPEAL 



'ONAS had waited for the coming of the 
quarterly meeting to carry his appeal to the 
presiding elder. The quarterly meeting for the cir- 
cuit was held at the village of Brayville, and beds 
were made upon the floor for the guests who crowded 
the town. Every visiting Methodist had a right to entertain- 
ment, and every resident Methodist opened his doors very wide, 
for Western people are hospitable in a fashion and with a boun- 
tifulness unknown on the eastern side of the mountains. Who 
that has not known it, can ever understand the delightfulness of 
a quarterly meeting? The meeting of old friends — the social 
life — is all but heavenly. And then the singing of the old Meth- 
odist hymns, such as 

“Oh! that will be joyful l 
Joyful ! joyful ! 

Oh ! that will be joyful. 

To meet to part no more.’* 


An d that other solemnly-sweet refrain: 

“The reaping-time will surely come. 
And angels shout the harvest home!** 


244 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


And who shall describe the joy of a Christian mother, when her 
scapegrace son “laid down the arms of his rebellion” and was 
“ soundly converted ” ? Let those sneer who will, but such moral 
miracles as are wrought in Methodist revivals are more won- 
derful than any healing of the blind or raising of the dead 
could be. 

Jonas turned up, faithful to his promise, and called on the 
“ elder ” at the place where he was staying, and asked for a pri- 
vate interview. He found the old gentleman exercising his 
sweet voice in singing, 

“ Come, let us anew 
Our journey pursue, 

Roll round with the year. 

And never stand still till the Master appear. 

His adorable will 
Let us gladly fulfill, 

And our talents improve 

By the patience of hope and the labor of love.” 

When he concluded the verse he raised his half-closed eyes 
and saw Jonas standing in the door. 

“Mr. Persidin’ Elder,” said Jonas, trying in vain to speak 
with some seriousness and veneration, “ I come to ax your 
consent to marry one of your flock— the best lamb you’ve 
got in the whole fold.” 

“Bless you, Mr. Harrison,” said Father Williams, the old 
elder, laughing, “ bless you, I haven’t any right to consent or 
forbid. Ask the lady herself ! ” 

“ Ax the lady!” said Jonas. “Didn’t I though ! And didn’t 
Mr. Goshorn forbid the lady to marry me, under the pains and 
penalties pervided ; and didn’t Mr. Hall set his seal to the for- 
biddin’ of Goshorn ! An’ I says to her, ‘ I won’t take nothin’ less 


JONAS TAKES AN APPEAL. 


245 


than a elder or a bishop on this ’ere vital question.’ When I 
want a sheep, I don’t go to the underlin,’ but to the boss ; and 
so I brought this appeal up to you on a writ of habeas corpus , or 
whatever you may call it.” 

The presiding elder laughed again, and looked closely at 
Jonas. Then he stepped to the door and called in the circuit 
preacher, Mr. Hall, and the class leader, Mr. Goshom, both of 
whom happened to be in the next room engaged in an excited 
discussion with a brother who was a little touched with Mil- 
lerism. 

“ What’s this Mr. Harrison tells me about your forbidding the 
banns in his case?” 

“ He’s a New Light,” said Brother Hall, showing his abhor- 
rence in his face, “ and it seemed to me that for a Methodist to 
marry a New Light was a sin — a being yoked together unequally 
with an unbeliever. You know, Father Williams, that New 
Lights are Arians.” 

The old man seemed more amused than ever. Turning to 
Jonas, he asked him if he was an Arian. 

“Not as I knows on, my venerable friend. I may have 
caught the disease when I had the measles, or I may have been a 
Arian in infancy, or I may be a Arian on my mother’s side, 
you know ; but as I don’t know who or what it may be, I a’n’t in 
no way accountable fer it — no more’n Brother Goshorn is to blame 
fer his face bein’ so humbly. But I take it Arian is one of them 
air pleasant names you and the New Light preachers uses in 
your Christian intercourse together to make one another mad. 
I’m one of them as goes to heaven straight — never stoppin’ to 
throw no donicks at the Methodists, Presbyterians, nor no other 
misguided children of men. They may ride in the packet, or go 


246 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


by flat-boat or keel-boat, ef they chooses. I go by the swift* 
sailin’ and palatial mail-boat New Light, and I don’t run no 
opposition line, nor bust my bilers tryin’ to beat my neighbors 
into the heavenly port.” 

Brother Goshorn looked vexed. Brother Hall was scan- 
dalized at the lightness of Jonas’s conversation. But the old 
presiding elder, with keen common-sense and an equally keen 



BROTHER GOSHORN. 


sense of the ludicrous, could not look grave with al\ his effort 
to keep from laughing. 

“Are you an unbeliever?” he asked. 

“I don’t know what you call onbeliever. I believe in God 
and Christ, and keep Sunday and the Fourth of July ; but I don’t 
believe in all of Brother Goshorn’s nonsense about wearing veils 
and artificials.” 

“Well,” said Brother Hall, “would you endeavor to induce 
your wife to dress in a m ann er unbecoming a Methodist ? ’* 






SAT THEM WORDS OYER, AGAIN. 










JONAS TAKES AN APPEAL. 


249 

“ I wouldn’t fer the world. If I git the article I want, I don’t 
keer what it’s tied up in, calico or bombazine.” 

“ Couldn’t you join the Methodist Church yourself, and keep 
your wife company ? ” It was Brother Goshom who spoke. 

“ Couldn’t I ? I suppose I could ef I didn’t think no more 
of religion than some other folks. I could jine the Methodist 
Church, and have everybody say I jined to git my wife. That 
may be serving God; but I can’t see how. And then how long 
would you keep me ? The very fust time I fired off my blunder- 
buss in class-meetin’, and you heerd the buckshot and the 
squirrel-shot and the slugs and all sorts of things a-rattlin’ 
around, you’d say I was makin’ fun of the Gospel. I ’low they 
a’n’t no Methodist in me. I was cut out cur’us, you know, and 
made up crooked.” 

“ Is there anything against Mr. Harrison, Brother Goshom ? ” 
asked the elder. 

“ He’s a New Light,” said Mr. Goshom, in a tone that signi- 
fied his belief that to be a New Light was enough. 

“ Is he honest and steady ? ” 

“Never heard anything against him as a moralist.” 

“ Well, then, it’s my opinion that any member of your class 
would do better to marry a good, faithful, honest New Light 
than to marry a hickory Methodist.” 

Jonas got up like one demented, and ran out of the door and 
across the street. In a moment he came back, bringing Cynthy 
Ann in triumph. 

“ Now, say them words over again,” he said to the presiding 
elder. 

“ Sister Cynthy Ann,” said the presiding elder, “you really 


love Brother Harrison ? ” 


250 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“ I — I don’t know whether it’s right to set our sinful hearts on 
the things of this perishin’ world. But I think more of him, 
I’m afeard, than I had ort to. He’s got as good a heart as I ever 
seed. But Brother Goshorn thought I hadn’t orter marry him, 
seein’ he is a onbeliever.” 

“ But I a’n’t,” said Jonas ; “ I believe in the Bible, and in every- 
thing in it, and in Cynthy Ann and her good Methodist religion 
besides.” 

“I think you can give up all your scruples and marry Mr. 
Harrison, and love him and be happy,” said the presiding elder. 
“Don’t be afraid to be happy, my sister. You’ll be happy in 
good company in heaven, and you’d just as well get used to it 
here.” 

“I told you I’d find a man that had salt enough to keep 
his religion sweet. And, Father Williams, you’ve got to marry 
us, whenever Cynthy Ann’s ready,” said Jonas with enthusiasm. 

And for a moment the look of overstrained scrupulosity on 
Cynthy Ann’s face relaxed and a strange look of happiness came 
into her eyes. 

And the time was fixed then and there. 

Brother Hall was astonished. 

And Brother Goshorn drew down his face, and said that he 
didn’t know what was to become of good, old-fashioned Method- 
ism and the rules of the Disapline, if the presiding elders talked 
in that sort of a way. The church was going to the dogs. 


SELLING OUT, 


251 


CHAPTER XL. 

SELLING OUT. 

f -^HE flight of the Hawk did not long dampen the 
ardor of those who were looking for signs in the 
heaven above and the earth beneath. I have known 
a school-master to stand, switch in hand, and give a 
stubborn boy a definite number of minutes to yield. 
The boy who would not have submitted on account of any 
amount of punishment, was subdued by the awful waiting. We 
have all read the old school-book story of the prison-warden who 
brought a mob of criminals to subjection by the same process. 
Millerism produced some such effect as this. The assured belief 
of the believers had a great effect on others ; the dreadful draw- 
ing on of the set time day by day produced an effect in some 
regions absolutely awful. An eminent divine, at that time a pas- 
tor in Boston, has told me that the leaven of Adventism per- 
meated all religious bodies, and that he himself could not avoid 
the fearful sense of waiting for some catastrophe — the impres- 
sion that all this expectation of people must have some signifi- 
cance. If this was the effect in Boston, imagine the effect 
in a country neighborhood like Clark township. Andrew, skep* 


252 


THE END OF THE WORLD, 


tical as he was visionary, was almost the only man that escaped 
the infection. Jonas would have been as frankly irreverent if 
the day of doom had come as he was at all times; but even 
Jonas had come to the conclusion that “ somethin’ would hap- 
pen, or else somethin’ else.” August, with a young man’s 
impressibility, was awe-stricken with thoughts of the nearing 
end of the world, and Julia accepted it as settled. 

It is a good thing that the invisible world is so thoroughly 
shut out from this. The effect of too vivid a conception of it 
is never wholesome. It was pernicious in the middle age, and 
clairvoyance and spirit-rapping would be great evils to the world, 
if it were not that the spirits, even of the ablest men, in losing 
their bodies seem to lose their wits. It is well that it is so, for 
if Washington Irving dictated to a medium accounts of the other 
world in a style such as that of his “ Little Britain,” for instance, 
we should lose all interest in the affairs of this sphere, and nobody 
would buy our novels. 

This fever of excitement kept alive Samuel Anderson’s deter- 
mination to sell his farms for a trifle as a testimony to unbe- 
lievers. He found that fifty dollars would meet his expenses 
until the eleventh of August, and so the price was set at that. 

As soon as Andrew heard of this, he privately arranged with 
Jonas to buy it; but Mrs. Anderson utterly refused. She said 
she could see through it all. Jonas was one of Andrew’s fingers. 
Andrew had got to be a sort of a king in Clark township, and 
Jonas was — was the king’s fool. She did not mean that any of 
her property should go into the hands of the clique that were try- 
ing to rob her of her property and her daughter. Even for two 
weeks they should not own her house ! 

Before this speech was ended. Bob Walker entered the door. 


SELLING OUT. 


253 


Bob was tall, stooped, good-natured, and desperately poor. With 
ten children under twelve years of age, with an incorrigible fond- 
ness for loafing and telling funny stories, Bob saw no chance to 
improve his condition. A man may be either honest or lazy and 



“i WANT TO BUT YOUR PLACE.” 


get rich ; but a man who is both honest and indolent is doomed. 
Bob lived in a cabin on the Anderson farm, and when not 
hired by Samuel Anderson he did days’ work here and there, 
riding to and from his labor on a raw-boned mare, tnat was the 
laughing-stock of the county. Bob pathetically called her Splin- 



254 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


ter-shin, and he always rode bareback, for the very good reason 
that he had neither saddle nor sheepskin. 

“ Mr. Anderson,” said Bob, standing in the door and trying t<5 
straighten the chronic stoop out of his shoulders, “I want to 
buy your place.” 

If Bob had said that he wanted to be elected president 
Samuel Anderson could not have been more surprised. 

“You look astonished; but folks don’t know everything. I 
’low I know how to lay by a little. But I never could git enough 
to buy a decent kind of a tater-patch. So I says to my ole 
woman this momin’, ‘ Jane,’ says I, ‘ let’s git some ground. Let’s 
buy out Mr. Anderson, and see how it’ll feel to be rich fer a few 
days. If she all burns up, let her burn, I say. We’ve had a pla- 
guey hard time of it, let’s see how it goes to own two farms fer 
awhile.’ And so we thought we’d ruther hev the farms fer two 
weeks than a little money in a ole stocking. What d’ye say ? ” 

Jonas here put in that he didn’t see why they mightn’t sell 
to him as well as to Bob Walker. Cynthy Ann had worked fer 
Mrs. Anderson fer years, and him and Cynthy was a-goin’ to 
be one man soon. Why not sell to them ? 

“Because selling to you is selling to Andrew,” said Mrs. 
Abigail, in a conclusive way. 

And so Bob got the farms, possession to be given after the 
fourteenth of August, thus giving the day of doom three days 
of grace. And Bob rode round the county boasting that he was 
as rich a man as there was in Clark Township. And Jonas de- 
clared that ef the eend did come in the month of August, 
Abigail would find some onsettled bills agin her fer cheatin’ 
the brother outen the inheritance, And Clark Township agreed 
with him, 


SELLING OUT. 


255 


August was secretly pleased that one obstacle to his mar- 
riage was gone. If Andrew should prove right, and the world 
should outlast the middle of August, there would he nothing 
dishonorable in his marrying a girl that would have nothing to 
sacrifice. 

Andrew, for his part, gave vent to his feelings, as usual, by 
two or three bitter remarks leveled at the whole human race, 
though nowadays he was inclined to make exceptions in favor 
of several people, of whom Julia stood first. She was a 
woman of the old-fashioned kind, he said, fit to go alongside 
Heloise or Chaucer’s Grisilde. 


256 


THE END OF THE WOELD. 


CHAPTER XLI. 

THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT. 

f ^yHE religious excitement reached its culmination 
as the tenth and eleventh of August came on. 
Some made ascension-robes. Work was suspended 
everywhere. The more abandoned, unwilling to 
yield to the panic, showed its effects on them by 
deeper potations, and by a recklessness of wickedness meant 
to conceal their fears. With tin horns they blasphemously 
affected to be angels blowing trumpets. They imitated the 
Millerite meetings in their drunken sprees, and learned Mr. 
Hankins’s arguments by heart. 

The sun of the eleventh of August rose gloriously. People 
pointed to it with trembling, and said that it would rise no 
more. Soon after sunrise there were crimson clouds stretching 
above and below it, and popular terror seized upon this as a 
sign. But the sun mounted with a scorching heat, which 
showed that at least his shining power was not impaired. Then 
men said, “ Behold the beginning of the fervent heat that is to 
melt the elements!” Night drew on, and every “ shooting-star ” 
was a new sign of the end. The meteors, as usual at this time 


THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT. 257 


of the year, were plentiful, and the simple-hearted country- 
folk were convinced that the stars were falling out of the sky. 

A large bald hill overlooking the Ohio was to be the mount 
of ascension. Here gathered Elder Hankins’s flock with that 
comfortable assurance of being the elect that only a narrow 
bigotry can give. And here came others of all denominations, 
consoling themselves that they were just as well off if they were 
Christians as if they had made all this fuss about the millennium. 
Here was August, too, now almost well, joining with the rest in 
singing those sweet and inspiring Adventist hymns. His German 
heart could not keep still where there was singing, and now, in 
gratefulness at new-found health, he was more inclined to music 
than ever. So he joined heartily and sincerely in the song that 
begins : 

“ Shall Simon bear his cross alone, 

And all the world go free? 

No, there’s a cross for every one. 

And there’s a cross for me. 

I’ll bear the consecrated cross 
Till from the cross I’m free, 

And then go home to wear the crown, 

For there’s a crown for me! 

Yes, there’s a crown in heaven above, 

The purchase of a Saviour’s love. 

Oh ! that’s the crown for me I ” 

When the concourse reached the lines, 

“The saints have heard the midnight cry, 

G« meet him in the air!” 

neither August nor any one else could well resist the infection 
of the profound and awful belief in the immediate coming of the 
end which pervaded the throng. Strong men and women wept 
and shouted with the excitement. 


258 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


Then Elder Hankins exhorted a little. He said that the time 
was short. But men’s hearts were hard. As in the days of the 
flood, they were marrying and giving in marriage. Not half a 
mile away a wedding was at that time taking place, and a man 
who called himself a minister could not discern the signs of the 
times, but was solemnizing a marriage. 

This allusion was to the marriage of Jonas, which was to take 
place that very evening at the castle. Mrs. Anderson had refused 
to have “ such wicked nonsense ” at her house, and as Cynthy 
had no home, Andrew had appointed it at the castle, partly to 
oblige Jonas, partly from habitual opposition to Abigail, but 
chiefly to express his contempt for Adventism. 

Mrs. Anderson herself was in a state of complete sublima- 
tion. She had sent for Norman, that she might get him ready for 
the final judgment, and Norman, without the slightest inclination 
to be genuinely religious, was yet a coward, and made a provi- 
sional repentance, not meant to hold good if Elder Hankins’s 
figures should fail ; just such a repentance as many a man has 
made on what he supposed to be his death-bed. Do not I 
remember a panic-stricken man, converted by typhoid fever and 
myself, who laughed as soon as he began to eat gruel, to think 
that he had been “ such a fool as to send for the preacher ” ? 

Now, between Mrs. Anderson’s joy at Norman’s conversion, 
and her delight that the world would soon be at an end and 
she on the winning side, and her anticipation of the pleasure 
she would feel even in heaven in saying, “ I told you so ! ” to 
her unbelieving friends, she quite forgot Julia. In fact she 
went from one fit of religious catalepsy to another, falling into 
trances, or being struck down with what was mysteriously 
called “ the power.” She had relaxed her vigilance about Julia, 


THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT. 259 


for there were but three more hours of time, and she felt that 
the goal was already gained, and she had carried her point to 
the very last. A satisfaction for a saint! 

The neglected Julia naturally floated toward the outer edge 
of the surging crowd, and she and August inevitably drifted 
together. 

“Let us go and see Jonas married,” said August. “It is no 
harm. God can take us to heaven from one place as well as 
another, if we are His children.” 

In truth, Julia was wearied and bewildered, not to say dis- 
gusted, with her mother’s peculiar religious exercises, and she 
gladly escaped with August to the castle and the wedding of 
her faithful friends. 

Andrew, in a spirit of skeptical defiance, had made his castle 
look as flowery and festive as possible. The wedding took place 
in the lower story, but the library was illuminated, and the 
Adventists who had occasion to pass by Andrew’s on their way to 
the rendezvous accepted this as a new fulfillment of prophecy to 
the very letter. They nodded one to another, and, said, “ See 1 
marrying and giving in marriage, as in the days of Noah ! ” 

August and Julia were too much awe-stricken to say much 
on their way to the castle. But in these last hours of a world 
grown old and ready for its doom, they cleaved closer together. 
There could be neither heaven nor millennium for one of them 
without the other! Loving one another made them love God 
the more, and love cast out all fear. If this was the Last, they 
would face it together, and if it proved the Beginning, they 
would rejoice together. At sight of every shooting meteor, 
Julia clung almost convulsively to August. 

When they entered the castle, Jonas and Cynthy were already 


260 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


standing up before the presiding elder, and he was about to begin. 
Cynthy’s face showed her sense of the awfulness of marrying at a 
moment of such fearful expectation, or perhaps she was troub- 
ling herself for fear that so much happiness out of heaven was 
to be had only in the commission of a capital sin. But, like 
most people whose consciences are stronger than their intellects, 
she found great consolation in taking refuge under the wing of 
ecclesiastical authority. To be married by a presiding elder 
was the best thing in the world next to being married by a 
bishop. 

Whatever fear of the swift-coming judgment others might 
have felt, the benignant old elder was at peace. Common- 
sense, a clean conscience, and a child -like faith enlightened his 
countenance, and since he tried to be always ready, and since 
his meditations made the things of the other life ever present, 
his pulse would scarcely have quickened if he had felt sure that 
the archangel’s trump would sound in an hour. He neither felt 
the subdued fear shown on the countenance of Cynthy Ann, nor 
the strong skeptical opposition of Andrew, whose face of late had 
grown almost into a sneer. 

“Do you take this woman to be your lawful and wedded 
wife ” 

And before the elder could finish it, Jonas blurted out, “ You’d 
better believe I do, my friend.” 

And then when the old man smiled and finished his ques- 
tion down to, “ so long as ye both shall live,” Jonas responded 
eagerly, “ Tell death er the jedgment-day, long or short” 

And Cynthy Ann answered demurely out of her frightened 
but too happy heart, and the old man gave them his benediction 
in an apostolic fashion that removed Cynthy Ann’s scruples, and 


THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT. 261 

smoothed a little of the primness out of her face, so that she 
almost smiled when Jonas said, “Well! it’s done now, and 
it can’t be undone fer all the Goshoms in Christendom er 
creation ! ” 

And then the old gentleman — for he was a gentleman, though 
he had always been a backwoodsman — spoke of the excite- 
ment, and said that it was best always to be ready — to be ready 
to live, and then you would be ready for death or the judgment. 
That very night the end might come, but it was not best to 
trouble one’s self about it. And he smiled, and said that it was 
none of his business, God could manage the universe ; it ^eas for 
him to be found doing his duty as a faithful servant. And then it 
would be just like stepping out of one door into another, 
whenever death or the judgment should come. 

While the old man was getting ready to leave, Julia and Au- 
gust slipped away, fearing lest their absence should be discov- 
ered. But the peacefulness of the old elder’s face had entered 
into their souls, and they wished that they too were solemnly 
pronounced man and wife, with so sweet a benediction upon 
their union. 

“ I do not feel much anxious about the day of judgment 
or the millennium,” said August, whose idiom was sometimes 
a little broken. “When I was so near dying I felt satisfied 
to die after you had kissed my lips. But now that it seems we 
have come upon the world’s last days, I wish I were married to 
you. I do not know how things will be in the new heaven and 
the new earth. But I should like you to be my wife there, 
or at least to have been my wife on earth, if only for one hour.” 

And then he proposed that they should be made man and wife 
now in the world’s last hour. It was not wrong. It could not 


v 


2G2 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


give her mother heart-disease, for she would not know of it till 
she should hear it in the land where there are neither marriages 
nor sickness. Julia could not see any sin in her disobedience 
under such circumstances. She did so much want to go into the 
New Jerusalem as the wedded wife of August “the grand,” 
as she fondly called him. 

And so in the stillness of that awful night they walked back 
to Andrew’s castle, and found the. venerable preacher, with sad- 
dle-bags on his arm, ready to mount his horse, for the presiding 
elder of that day had no leisure time. Jonas and Cynthy stood 
bidding him good-by. And the old man was saying again that if 
we were always ready it would be like stepping from one door 
into another. But he thought it as wrong to waste time gazing 
up into heaven to see Christ come, as it had been to gaze after 
Him when He went away. Even Jonas’s voice was a little soft- 
ened by the fearful thought ever present of the coming on of 
that awful midnight of the eleventh of August. All were sur- 
prised to see the two young people come back. 

“ Father Williams,” said August, “ we thought we should 
like to go into the New Jerusalem man and wife. Will you 
marry us?” 

“ Sensible to the last ! ” cried Jonas. 

“ According to the laws of this State,” said Mr. Williams, “ you 
can not be married without a license from the clerk of the county. 
Have you a license ? ” 

“ No,” said August, his heart sinking. 

Just then Andrew came up and inquired what the conversa- 
tion was about. 

“ Why, Uncle Andrew,” said Julia eagerly [ “ August and I 
don’t want the end of the world to come without being man and 


THE LAST DAT AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT. 2G3 


wife. And we have no license, and August could not go seven 
miles and back to get a license before midnight. It is too bad, 
isn’t it ? If it wasn’t that we think the end of the world is so 
near, I should be ashamed to say how much I want to be mar- 
ried. But I shall be proud to have been August’s wife, when I 
am among the angels.” 

“ You are a noble woman,” said Andrew. “ Come in, let us 
see if anything can be done.” ' And he led the way, smiling. 


264 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


CHAPTER X L 1 1. 

FOR EVER AND EVER. 


HEN they had all re-entered the castle, An- 
drew made them sit down. The old minister 
did not see any escape from the fatal obstacle 
of a lack of license, but Andrew was very mys- 
terious. 

“Virtue is its own reward,” said the Philosopher, “but it 
often finds an incidental reward besides. Now, Julia, you are 
the noblest woman in these degenerate times, according to my 
way of thinking.” 

“ That’s true as preachin’, ef you’ll except one,” chirped Jonas, 
with a significant look at his Cynthy Ann. Julia blushed, and 
the old minister looked inquiringly at Andrew and at Julia. 
This exaggerated praise from a man so misanthropic as Andrew 
excited his curiosity. 

“ Without exception,” said Andrew emphatically, looking first 
at Jonas, then at Mr. Williams, “ my niece is the noblest woman 
I ever knew.” 

“ Please don’t, Uncle Andrew ! ” begged Julia, almost speech- 
less with shame. Praise was something she could not bear. She 
was inured to censure. 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 


265 


Do you remember that dark night — of course you do— when 
you braved everything and came here to see August, who would 
have died but for your coming ? ” AHdrew was now looking at 
Julia, who answered him almost inaudibly. 

“And do you remember when we got to your gate, on your 
return, what you said to me?” 

“ Yes, sir,” said Julia. 

“ To be sure y° u do > and ” (turning to August) “ I shall never 
forget her words ; she said, * If he should get worse, I should 
like him to die my husband, if he wishes it. Send for me, day or 
night, and I will come in spite of everything.’ ” 

“ Did you say that ? ” asked August, looking at her eagerly. 

And Julia nodded her head, and lifted her eyes, glistening 
with brimming tears, to his. 

“You do not know,” said Andrew to the preacher, “how 
much her proposal meant, for you do not know through what 
she would have had to pass. But I say that God does sometimes 
reward virtue in this world — a world not quite worn out yet — 
and she is worthy of the reward in store for her.” 

Saying this, Andrew went into the closet leading to his se- 
cret stairway — secret no longer, since Julia had ascended by that 
way — and soon came down from his library with a paper in his 
hand. 

“ When you, my noble-hearted niece, proposed to make any 
sacrifice to marry this studious, honest, true-hearted German 
gentleman, who is worthy of you, if any man can be, I thought 
best to be ready for any emergency, and so I went the next day 
and procured the license, the clerk promising to keep my secret. 

A marriage-license is good for thirty days. You will see, Mr. 
Williams, that this has not quite expired.” 


266 


TUB END OF THE WORLD. 


The minister looked at it and then said, “ I depend on your 
judgment, Mr. Anderson. There seems to be something peculiar 
about the circumstances of this marriage.’* 

“ Very peculiar,” said Andrew. 

“ You give me your word, then, that it is a marriage I ought 
to solemnize ? ” 

“The lady is my niece,” said Andrew. “The marriage, 
taking place in this castle, will shed more glory upon it than its 
whole history beside ; and you, sir, have never performed a mar- 
riage ceremony in a case whue the marriage was so excellent as 
this.” 

“Except the last one,” put in Jonas. 

I suppose Mr. Williams made the proper reductions for An- 
drew’s enthusiasm. But he was satisfied, and perhaps he was 
rather inclined to be satisfied, for gentle-hearted old men are 
quite susceptible to a romantic situation. 

When he asked August if he would live with this woman 
in holy matrimony “ so long as ye both shall live,” August, 
thinking the two hours of time left to him too short for the 
earnestness of his vows, looked the old minister in the eyes, 
and said solemnly : “ For ever and ever ! ” 

“ No, my son,” said the old man, smiling and almost weep- 
ing, “ that is not the right answer. I like your whole-hearted 
love. But it is far easier to say ‘ for ever and ever,’ standing as 
you think you do now on the brink of eternity, than to say 
1 till death do us part,’ looking down a long and weary road of 
toil and sickness and poverty and change and little vexations. 
You do not only take this woman, young and blooming, but 
old and sick and withered and wearied, perhaps. Do you take 
her for any lot?” 


FOR EVER AtfD EVER. 


2GY 


“ For any lot,” said August solemnly and humbly. 

And Julia, on her part, could only bow her head in reply to 
the questions, for the tears chased one another down her cheeks. 
And then came the benediction. The inspired old man, full of 
hearty sympathy, stretched his trembling hands with apostolic 
solemnity over the heads of the two, and said slowly, with sol- 
emn pauses, as the words welled up out of his soul : “ The peace 

of God that passeth all understanding ” (here his voice melted 

with emotion) “ keep your hearts and minds in the 

knowledge and love of God. And now, may grace — mercy 

and peace from God the Father — and our Lord Jesus 

Christ be with you — evermore Amen ! ” And to the 

imagination of Julia the Spirit of God descended like a dove 
into her heart, and the great mystery of wifely love and the other 
greater mystery of love to God seemed to flow together in her 
soul. And the quieter spirit of August was suffused with a great 
peace. 

They soon left the castle to return to the mount of ascension, 
but they walked slowly, and at first silently, over the intervening 
hill, which gave them a view of the Ohio River, sleeping in its 
indescribable beauty and stillness in the moonlight. 

Presently they heard the melodious voice of the old presiding 
elder, riding up the road a little way off, singing the hopeful 
hymns in which he so much delighted. The rich and earnest 
voice made the woods ring with one verse of 

“ Oh ! how happy are they 
Who the Saviour obey. 

And have laid up their treasure above t 
Tongue can never express 
The sweet comfort and peace 
Of a soul in its earliest love.” 


268 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


And then he broke into Watts’s 

“ When I can read my title clear 
To mansions in the skies, 

I’ll bid farewell to every fear 
And wipe my weeping eyes 1 ” 

There seemed to be some accord between the singing of the 
brave old man and the peacefulness of the landscape. Soon he 
had reached the last stanza, and in tones of subdued but ecstatic 
triumph he sang : 

“ There I shall bathe my weary soul 
In seas of heavenly rest, 

And not a wave of trouble roll 
Across my peaceful breast.” 

And with these words he passed round the hill and out of 
the hearing of the young people. 

“ August,” said Julia slowly, as if afraid to break a silence 
so blessed, “ August, it seems to me that the sky and the river 
and the hazy hills and my own soul are all alike, just as full of 
happiness and peace as they can be.” 

“Yes,” said August, smiling, “but the sky is clear, and your 
eyes are raining, Julia. But can it be possible that God, who 
made this world so beautiful, will burn it up to-night? It used 
to seem a hard world to me when I was away from you, and 
I didn’t care how quickly it burned up. But now ” 

Somehow August forgot to finish that sentence. Words are 
of so little use under such circumstances. A little pressure on 
Julia’s arm which was in his, told all that he meant. When love 
makes earth a heaven, it is enough. 

“ But how beautiful the new earth will be,” said Julia, still 
looking at the sleeping river, “ the river of life will be clear as 
crystal 1 ” 


FOR EVER AND EVER. 


269 


“ Yes,” said August, “ the Spanish version says, ‘ Most resplen- 
dent, like unto crystal.’” 

“ I think,” said Julia, “ that it must be something like this 
river. The trees of life will stand on either side, like those 
great sycamores that lean over the water so gracefully.” 

Any landscape would have seemed heavenly to Julia on this 
night. A venerable friend of mine, a true Christian philanthro- 
pist, whose praise is in all the churches, wants me to under- 
take to reform fictitious literature by leaving out the love. And 
so I may when God reforms His universe by leaving out the love. 
Love is the best thing in novels ; not until love is turned out of 
heaven will I help turn it out of literature. It is only the mis- 
representation of love in literature that is bad, as the poison- 
ing of love in life is bad. It was the love of August that had 
opened Julia’s heart to the influences of heaven, and Julia was to 
August a mediator of God’s grace. 

By eleven o’clock August Wehle and his wife — it gives me 
nearly as much pleasure as it did August to use that locution 
— were standing not far away from the surging crowd of those 
who, in singing hymns and in excited prayer, were waiting 
for the judgment. Jonas and Cynthy and Andrew were with 
them. August, though not a recognized Millerite, almost blamed 
himself that he should have been away these two hours from the 
services. But why should he ? The most sacramental of all the 
sacraments is marriage. Is it not an arbitrary distinction of the- 
ologians, that which makes two rites to be sacraments and others 
not ? But if the distinction is to be made at all, I should apply 
the solemn word to the solemnest rite and the holiest ordinance 
of God’s, even if I left out the sacred washing in the name of the 
Trinity and the broken emblematic bread and the wine. These 


270 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


are sacramental in their solemn symbolism, that in the solem* 
nest symbolism and the holiest reality. 

August’s whole attention was now turned toward the com- 
ing judgment; and as he stood thinking of the awfulness of 
this critical moment, the exercises of the Adventists grated 
on the deep peacefulness of his spirit, for from singing their 
more beautiful hymns, they had passed to an excited shouting of 
the old camp-meeting ditty whose refrain is : 

“ I hope to shout glory when this world’s all on fire 1 Hallelujah ! ” 

He and Julia hung back a moment, but Mrs. Abigail, who 
had recovered from her tenth trance, and had been for some time 
engaged in an active search for Julia, now pounced upon her, 
and bore her off, before she had time to think, to the place of 
the hottest excitement. 


THE MIDNIGHT ALARM, 


271 


CHAPTER XLHL 


THE MIDNIGHT ALARM. 



T last the time drew on toward midnight, the 
hour upon which all expectation was concentrated. 
For did not the Parable of the Ten Virgins speak 
of the coming of the bridegroom at midnight ? 
“My friends and brethren,” said Elder Han- 
kins, his voice shaking with emotion, as he held his watch up 
in the moonlight, “My friends and brethren, ef the Word is true, 
they is but five minutes more before the cornin’ in of the new 
dispensation. Let us spend the last moments of time in silent 
devotion.” 

“ I wonder ef he thinks the world runs down by his pay- 
tent-lee ver watch?” said Jonas, who could not resist the im- 
pulse to make the remark, even with the expectation of the im- 
mediate coming of the day of judgment in his mind. 

“ I wonder for what longitude he calculates prophecy ? ” said 
Andrew. “ It can not be midnight all round the world at the 
same moment.” 

But Elder Hankins’s flock did not take any astronomical diffi- 
culty into consideration. And no spectator could look upon them, 
bowing silently in prayer, awed by the expectation of the sud* 


272 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


den coming of the Lord, without feeling that, however much 
the expectation might be illusory, the emotion was a fact abso- 
lutely awful. Events are only sublime as they move the human 
soul, and the swift-coming end of time was subjectively a great 
reality to these waiting people. Even Andrew was awe-stricken 
from sympathy; as Coleridge, when he stood godfather for 
Keble’s child, was overwhelmed with a sense of the significance 
of the sacrament from Keble’s stand-point. As for Cynthy Ann, 
she trembled with fear as she held fast to the arm of Jonas. 
And Jonas felt as much seriousness as was possible to him, until 
he heard Norman Anderson’s voice crying with terror and excite- 
ment, and felt Cynthy shudder on his arm. 

“ Fer my part,” said Jonas, turning to Andrew, “ it don’t seem 
like as ef it was much use to holler and make a furss about the 
corn crap when October’s fairly sot in, and the frost has nipped 
the blades. All the plowin’ and hoein’ and weedin’ and thinnin’ 
out the suckers won’t better the yield then. An’ when wheat’s 
ripe, they’s nothin’ to be done fer it. It’s got to be rep jest as 
it stan’s. I’m rale sorry, to-night, as my life a’n’t no better, but 
■what’s the use of cryin’ over it ? They’s nothin’ to do now 
but let it be gethered and shelled out, and measured up in 
the standard half-bushel of the sanctuary. And I’m afeard they 11 
be a heap of nubbins not wuth the shuckin’. But ef it don’t 
come to six bushels the acre, I can’t help it now by takin’ on. ’ 
At twelve o’clock, even the scoffers were silent. But as the 
sultry night drew on toward one o’clock, Bill Day and his party 
felt their spirits revive a little. The calculation had failed in 
one part, and it might in all. Bill resumed his burlesque exhorta- 
tions to the rough-looking “ brethren ” about him. He tried to 
ead them in singing some ribald parody of Adventist hymns, 


THE MiDNTGHT ALARM. 


273 


but his terror and theirs was too genuine, and their voices died 
down into husky whispers, and they were more alarmed than 
ever at discovering the extent of their own demoralization. The 
bottle, one of those small-necked, big-bodied quart-bottles that 
Western topers carry in yellow-cotton handkerchiefs, was passed 
round. But even the whisky seemed powerless to neutralize 
their terror, rather increasing the panic by fuddling their faculties. 

“ Boys ! ” said Bob Short, trembling, and sitting down on a 
stump, “this — this ere thing — is a gittin’ serious. Ef — well, ef 
it was to happen — you know — you don’t s’pose— ahem — you don’t 
think God A’mighty would be too heavy on a feller. Do ye ? Ef 
it was to come to-night, it would be blamed short notice.” 

At one o’clock the moon was just about dipping behind the 
hills, and the great sycamores, standing like giant sentinels on 
the river’s marge, cast long unearthly shadows across the water, 
which grew blacker every minute. The deepening gloom gave 
all objects in the river valley a weird, distorted look. This op- 
pressed August. The landscape seemed an enchanted one, a 
something seen in a dream or a delirium. It was as though the 
change had already come, and the real tangible world had passed 
away. He was the more susceptible from the depression caused 
by the hot sultriness of the night, and his separation from Julia. 

He thought he would try to penetrate the crowd to the point 
where his mother was ; then he would be near her, and nearer 
to Julia if anything happened. A curious infatuation had taken 
hold of August. He knew that it was an infatuation, but 
he could not shake it off. He had resolved that in case the trum- 
pet should be heard in the heavens, he would seize Julia and 
claim her in the very moment of universal dissolution. He 
reached his mother, and as he looked into her calm face, ready 


274 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


for the millennium or for anything else “the Father” should 
decree, he thought she had never seemed more glorious than 
she did now, sitting with her children about her, almost unmoved 
by the excitement. For Mrs. Wehle had come to take every- 
thing as from the Heavenly Father. She had even received 
honest but thick-headed Gottlieb in this spirit, when he had 
fallen to her by the Moravian lot, a husband chosen for her 
by the Lord, whose will was not to be questioned. 

August was just about to speak to his mother, when he 
was forced to hang his head in shame, for there was his father 
rising to exhort. 

“ O mine freunde ! pe shust immediadely all of de dime retty. 
Ton’t led your vait vail already, and ton’t let de debil git no 
unter holts on ye. Yatch and pe retty ! ” 

And August could hear the derisive shouts of Bill Day’s party, 
who had recovered their courage, crying out, “ Go it, ole Dutch- 
man ! I’ll bet on you ! ” He clenched his fist in anger, but 
his mother’s eyes, looking at him with quiet rebuke, pacified him 
in a moment. Yet he could not help wondering whether blun- 
dering kinsfolk made people blush in the next world. 

“ Holt on doo de last ent ! ” continued Gottlieb. “ It’s pout 
goom ! Kood pye, ole moon! You koes town, you nebber 
gooms pack no more already.” 

This exhortation might have proceeded in this strain indefi- 
nitely, to the mortification of August and the amusement of the 
profane, had there not just at that moment broken upon the 
sultry stillness of the night one of those crescendo thunder-bursts, 
beginning in a distant rumble, and swelling out louder and still 
louder, until it ended with a tremendous detonation. In the 
strange light of the setting moon, while everybody’s attention 


THE MIDNIGHT ALARM. 


275 


was engrossed by the excitement, the swift oncoming of a thun- 
der-cloud had not been observed by any but Andrew, and it 
had already climbed half-way to the zenith, blotting out a third 
of the firmament. This inverted thunder-bolt produced a start- 
ling effect upon the over-strained nerves of the crowd. Some 
cried out with terror, some sobbed with hysterical agony, some 
shouted in triumph, and it was generally believed that Virginia 
Waters, who died a maniac many years afterward, lost her reason 
at that moment. Bill Day ceased his mocking, and shook till his 
teeth chattered. And none of his party dared laugh at him. 

t 

The moon had now gone, and the vivid lightning followed the 
thunder, and yet louder and more fearful thunder succeeded 
the lightning. The people ran about as if demented, and Julia 
was left alone. August had only one thought in all this con- 
fusion, and that was to find Julia. Having found her, they 
clasped hands, and stood upon the brow of the hill calmly 
watching the coming tempest, believing it to be the coming of 
the end. Between the claps of thunder they could hear the 
broken sentences of Elder Hankins, saying something about the 
lightning that shineth from one part of heaven to the other, and 
about the promised coming in the clouds. But they did not 
much heed the words. They were looking the blinding light- 
ning in the face, and in their courageous trust they thought 
themselves ready to look into the flaming countenance of the 
Almighty, if they should be called before Him. Every fresh 
burst of thunder seemed to August to be the rocking of the 
world, trembling in the throes of dissolution. But the world 
might crumble or melt ; there is something more enduring than 
the world. August felt the everlastingness of love; as many 
another man in a supreme crisis has felt it. 


276 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


But the swift cloud had already covered half the sky, and 
the bursts of thunder followed one another now in quicker suc- 
cession. And as suddenly as the thunder had come, came the 
wind. A solitary old sycamore, leaning over the water on the 
Kentucky shore, a mile away, was first to fall. In the lurid dark- 
ness, August and Julia saw it meet its fate. Then the rail fences 
on the nearer bank were scattered like kindling-wood, and some 
of the sturdy old apple-trees of the orchard in the river-bottom 
were uprooted, while others were stripped of their boughs. 
Julia clung to August and said something, but he could only see 
her lips move ; her voice was drowned by the incessant roar of 
the thunder. And then the hurricane struck them, and they 
half-ran and were half-carried down the rear slope of the 
hill. Now they saw for the first time that the people were 
gone. The instinct of self-preservation had proven stronger 
than their fanaticism, and a contagious panic had carried them 
into a hay-barn near by. 

Not knowing where the rest had gone, August and Julia 
only thought of regaining the castle. They found the path 
blocked by fallen trees, and it was slow and dangerous work, 
waiting for flashes of lightning to show them their road. In 
making a long detour they lost the path. After some minutes, 
in a lull in the thunder, August heard a shout, which he an- 
swered, and presently Philosopher Andrew appeared with a lan- 
tern, his grizzled hair and beard flying in the wind. 

“ What ho, my friends ! ” he cried. “ This is the way you go 
to heaven together ! You’ll live through many a storm yet ! ” 

Guided by his thorough knowledge of the ground, they had 
almost reached the caatle, when they were startled by piteous 
cries. Leaving August with Julia, Andrew climbed a fence, and 


THE MIDNIGHT ALARM. 


277 


went down into a ravine to find poor Bill Day in an agony of 
terror, crying out in despair, believing that the day of doom 
had already come, and that he was about to be sent into well- 
deserved perdition. Andrew stooped over him with his lantern, 
but the poor fellow, giving one look at the shaggy face, shrieked 
madly, and rushed away into the woods. 

“ I believe,” said the Philosopher, when he got back to August, 
“ I believe he took me for the devil.” 


278 


THE END OF THE WOBLH, 


CHAPTER XLIV. 


SQUARING ACCOUNTS. 



'HE summer storm had spent itself by daylight, 
and the sun rose on that morning after the world’s 
end much as it had risen on other mornings, but it 
looked down upon prostrate trees and scattered fences 
and roofless barns. And the minds of the people were 
in much the same disheveled state as the landscape. One simple- 
minded girl was a maniac. Some declared that the world had 
ended, and that this was the new earth, if people only had faith 
to receive it ; some still waited for the end, and with some the 
reaction from credulity had already set in, a reaction that carried 
them into the blankest atheism and boldest immorality. People 
who had spent the summer in looking for a change that would 
relieve them from all responsibility, now turned reluctantly 
toward the commonplace drudgery of life. It is the evil of all 
day-dreaming — day-dreaming about the other world included — 
that it unfits us for duty in this world of tangible and inevitable 
facts. 

It was nearly daylight when Andrew and August and Julia 
reached the castle. The Philosopher advised Julia to go home, 


SQUARING ACCOUNTS. 


279 


and for the present to let the marriage be as though it were 
not. August dreaded to see Julia returned to her mother’s 
tyranny, but Andrew was urgent in his advice, and Julia said that 
she must not leave her mother in her trouble. Julia reached 
borne a little after daylight, and a little before Mrs, Anderson 
was brought home in a fit of hysterics. 

Poor Mrs. Abigail still hoped that the end of the world for 
which she had so fondly prepared would come, but as the days 
wore on she sank into a numb despondency. When she thought 
of the loss of her property, she groaned and turned her face to 
the wall. And Samuel Anderson sat about the house in a 
dumb and shiftless attitude, as do most men upon whom finan- 
cial ruin comes in middle life. The disappointment of his faith 
and the overthrow of his fortune had completely paralyzed him. 
He was waiting for something, he hardly knew what. He had 
not even his wife’s driving voice to stimulate him to exertion. 

There was no one now to care for Mrs. Anderson but Julia, 
for Cynthy had taken up her abode in the log-cabin which Jonas 
had bought, and a happier housekeeper never lived. She watched 
Jonas till he disappeared when he went to work in the morning, 
she carried him a “ snack ” at ten o’clock, and he always found her 
standing “ like a picter ” at the gate, when he came home to din- 
ner. But Cynthy Ann generally spent her afternoons at An- 
derson’s, helping “ that young thing ” to bear her responsibili- 
ties, though Mrs. Anderson would receive no personal attentions 
now from any one but her daughter. She did not scold; her 
querulous restlessness was but a reminiscence of her scolding. 
She lay, disheartened, watching Julia, and exacting everything 
from Julia, and the weary feet and weary heart of the girl almost 
sank under her burdens. Mrs. Anderson had suddenly fallen 


280 


THE END OE THE WORLD. 


from her position of an exacting tyrant to that of an exacting and 
helpless infant. She followed Julia with her eyes in a broken- 
spirited fashion, as if fearing that she would leave her. Julia 
could read the fear in her mother’s countenance ; she understood 
what her mother meant when she said querulously, “ You’ll get 
married and leave me.” If Mrs. Anderson had assumed her old 
high-handed manner, it would have been easy for Julia to have 
declared her secret. But how could she tell her now? It would 
be a blow, it might be a fatal blow. And at the same time how 
could she satisfy August? He thought she had bowed to the 
same old tyranny again for an indefinite time. But she could 
not forsake her parents in their poverty and afflictions. 

The fourteenth of August, the day on which possession was to 
have been given to Bob Walker, came and went, but no Bob 
Walker appeared. A week more passed, in which Samuel An- 
derson could not muster enough courage to go to see Walker, in 
which Samuel Anderson and his wife waited in a vague hope 
that something might happen. And every day of that week 
Julia had a letter from August, which did not say one word of the 
trial that it was for him to wait, but which said much of the 
wrong Julia was doing to herself to submit so long. And Julia, 
like her father and mother, was waiting for she knew not what. 

At last the suspense became to her unendurable. 

“ Father,” she said, “ why don’t you go to see Bob Walker? 
You might buy the farm back again.” 

“ I don’t know why he don’t come and take it,” said Mr. 
Anderson dejectedly. 

This conversation roused Mrs. Abigail. There was some hope. 
She got up in bed, and told Samuel to go to the county-seat and 
see if the deeds had ever been recorded. And while her husband 


SQUARING ACCOUNTS. 


281 


was gone she sat up and looked better, and even scolded a little, 
so that Julia felt encouraged. But she dreaded to see her father 
come back. 

Samuel Anderson entered the house on his return with a blank 
countenance. Sitting down, he put his face between his hands 
a minute in utter dejection. 

“ Why don’t you speak ? ” said Mrs. Anderson in a broken 
voice. 

“ The land was all transferred to Andrew immediately, and he 
owns every foot of it. He must have sent Bob Walker here 
to buy it.” 

“ Oh ! I’m so glad ! ” cried Julia. 

But her mother only gave her one reproachful look and went 
off into hysterical sobbing and crying over the wrong that 
Andrew had done her. And all that night Julia watched by 
her mother, while Samuel Anderson sat in dejection by the bed. 
As for Norman, he had quickly relapsed into his old habits, and 
his former cronies had generously forgiven him his temporary 
piety, considering the peculiar circumstances of the case some 
extenuation. Now that there was trouble in the house he staid 
away, which was a good thing so far as it went. 

The next afternoon Mrs. Anderson rallied a little, and, looking 
at Julia, she said in her querulous way, “ Why don’t you go and 
see him ?” 

“ Who ? ” said Julia with a shiver, afraid that her mother was 
insane. 

“ Andrew.” 

Julia did not need any second hint. Leaving her mother 
with Cynthy, she soon presented herself at the door of the castle. 

“ Did she send you? ” asked Andrew dryly. 


282 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


“Yes, sir.” 

“ I’ve been expecting you for a long time. I’ll go back with 
you. But August must go along. He’ll be glad of an excuse 
to see your face again. You look thin, my poor girl.” 

They went past Wehle’s, and August was only too glad to join 
them, rejoicing that some sort of a crisis had come, though how 
it was to help him he did not know. With the restlessness of a 
man looking for some indefinable thing to turn up, Samuel was 
out on the porch waiting the return of his daughter. Jonas had 
come for Cynthy Ann, and was sitting on a “ shuck-bottom ” 
chair in front of the house. 

Andrew reached out his hand and greeted his brother cor- 
dially, and spoke civilly to Abigail. ‘ Then there was a pause, 
and Mrs. Anderson turned her head to the wall and groaned. 
After a while she looked round and saw August. A little of her 
old indignation came into her eyes as she whimpered, “ What 
did he come for ? ” 

“ I brought him,” said Andrew. 

“Well, it’s your house, do as you please. I suppose you’ll 
turn us out of our own home now.” 

“As you did me,” said the Philosopher, smiling. “Let me 
remind you that I was living on the river farm. My father had 
promised it to me, and given me possession. A week before his 
death you got the will changed, by what means you know. 
You turned me off the farm which had virtually been mine for 
two years. If I turn you off now, it will be no more than fair.” 

There was a look of pained surprise on Julia’s face. She had 
not known that the wrong her uncle had suffered was so great. 
She had not thought that he would be so severe as to turn 
her father out. 


SQUARING ACCOUNTS. 


283 


“I don’t want to talk of these things,” Andrew went on. 
“ I ought to have broken the will, but I was not a believer in 
the law. I tell this story now because I must justify myself 
to these young people for what I am going to do. You have 
had the use of that part of the estate which was rightfully 
mine for twenty years. I suppose I may claim it all now.” 

Julia’s eyes looked at him pleadingly. 

“ Why don’t you send us off and be done with it then?” said 
Mrs. Abigail, rising up and resuming her old vehemence. “ You 
set out to ruin us, and now you’ve done it. A nice brother you 
are! Ruining us by a conspiracy with Bob Walker, and then 
sitting here and trying to make my own daughter think you did 
right, and bringing that hateful fellow here to hear it!” Her 
finger was leveled at August. 

“ I am glad to see you are better, Abigail. I wanted to be 
sure you were strong enough to bear all I have to say.” 

“ Say your worst and do your worst, you cruel, cruel man ! I 
have borne enough from you in these years, and now you can say 
and do what you please ; you can’t do me any more harm. I 
suppose I must leave my old home that I’ve lived in so long.” 

“You need not worry yourself about leaving; that’s what I 
came over to say.” 

“ As if I’d stay in your house an hour ! I’ll not take any 
favors at your hand.” 

“Don’t be rash, Abigail. I have deeded this hill farm to 
Samuel, and here is the deed. I have given you back the best 
half of the property, just what my father meant you to have. 

I have only kept the river land, that should have been mine 
twenty years ago. I hope you will not stick to your resolution 
not to receive anything at my hand.” 


284 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


And Julia said: “Oh! I’m so ” 

But Mrs. Anderson had a convenient fit of hysterics, crying 
piteously. Meantime Samuel gladly accepted the deed. 

“ The deed is already recorded. I sent it down yesterday as 
soon as I saw Samuel come back, and I got it back this morn- 
ing. The farm is yours without condition.” 

This relieved Abigail, and she soon ceased her sobbing. 
Andrew could not take it back then, whatever she might 
say. 

“ Now,” said Andrew, “ I have only divided the farms with- 
out claiming any damages. I want to ask a favor. Let Julia 
marry the man of her choice in peace.” 

“You have taken one farm, and therefore I must let my 
daughter marry a man with nothing but his two hands,” sobbed 
Mrs. Anderson. 

“ Two hands and a good head and a noble heart,” said 
Andrew. 

“ Well, I won’t consent,” said she. “ If Julia marries Am,” 
pointing to August, “she will marry without my consent, and 
he will not get a cent of the money he’s after. Not a red cent ! ” 

“ I don’t want your money. I did not know you’d get your 
farm back, for I did not know but that Walker owned it, and 
I — wanted — Julia all the same.” August had almost told that 
he had married Julia. 

“Wanted her and married her,” said Andrew. “And I have 
not kept a corn-stalk of the property I got from you. I have 
given Bob Walker a ten-acre patch for his services, and all the 
rest I have deeded to the two best people I know. This August 
Wehle married Julia Anderson when they thought the world 
might be near its end, and believing that, at any rate, she would 

!%* 


rjfvr- 


SQUARING ACCOUNTS. 


285 


not have a penny in the world. I have deeded the river farm to 
August Wehle and his wife.” 

“ Married, eh ? Come and ask my consent afterwards ? 
That’s a fine way ! ” And Abigail grew white and grew silent 
with passion. 

“ Come, August, I want to show you and Julia something,” 
said Andrew. He really wanted to give Abigail time to look the 
matter in the face quietly before she committed herself too far. 
But he told the two young people that they might make their 
home with him while their house was in building. He had 
already h#d part of the material drawn, and from the brow 
of the hill they looked down upon the site he had chosen near 
the old tumble-down tenant’s house. But Andrew saw that 
Julia looked disappointed. 

“You are not satisfied, my brave girl. What is the matter ? ” 

“ Oh ! yes, I am very happy, and very thankful to you ; and 

next to August I love you more than anybody except my 

parents.” 

“ But something is different to what you wished it. Doesn’t 
the site suit you ? You can look off on to the river from the rise 
on which the house will stand, and I do not know how it oould 
be better.” 

“It couldn’t be better,” said Julia, “but * 

“ But what ? You must tell me.” 

“ I thought maybe you’d let us live at the castle and take the 
burden of things off you. I should like to keep your house for 
you, just to show you how much I love my dear, good uncle.” 

Even an anchorite could not help feeling a pleasure at such a 
speech from such a young woman, and this shaggy, solitary, mis- 
anthropic but tender-hearted man felt a sudden rush of pleasure 


286 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


August saw it, and was delighted. What one’s nearest friend 
thinks of one’s wife is a vital question, and August was happier 
at this moment than he had ever been. Andrew’s pleasure at 
Julia’s loving speech was the climax. 

“ Yes ! ” said the Philosopher, a little huskily. “ You want to 
sacrifice your pleasure by living in my gloomy old castle, and 
civilizing an old heathen like me. You mustn’t tempt me too 
far.” 

“ I don’t see why you call it gloomy. It wasn’t only for your 
sake that I said it. I think it is the nicest old house I ever saw. 
And then the books, and — and — you.” Julia stumbled a little, she 
was not accustomed to make speeches of this sort. 

“You flatterer!” burst out Andrew. “But no, you must 
have your own house.” 

Mrs. Anderson, on her part, had concluded to make the best 
of it. Julia already married and the mistress of the Anderson 
river farm was quite a different thing from Julia under her 
thumb. She was to be conciliated. Besides, Mrs. Anderson did 
not want Julia’s prosperity to be a lifelong source of humiliation 
to her. She must take some stock in it at the start. 

“ Jule,” she said, as her daughter re-entered the door, “ I can 
let you have two feather-beds and four pillows, and a good 
stock of linen and blankets. And you can have the two heifers 
and the sorrel colt.” 

The two “ heifers ” were six, and the sorrel “ colt ” was seven 
years of age; but descriptive names often outlive the qualities 
to which they owed their origin. Just as a judge is even yet 
addressed as “your honor,” and many a governor without any- 
thing to recommend him hears himself called “ your excellency” 
When Abigail surrendered in this graceful fashion, Julia was 


SQUARING ACCOUNTS. 


287 


touched, and was on the point of putting her arms around her 
mother and kissing her. £ut Mrs. Anderson was not a person 
easily caressed, and Julia did not yield to her impulse. 

“ Cynthy Ann, my dear,” said Jonas, as they walked home 
that evening, “ do you know what Abig’il Anderson reminds 
me of ? ” 

No ; Cynthy Ann didn’t exactly know. In fact, it would have 
been difficult for anybody to have told what anything was likely 
to remind Jonas of. There was no knowing what a thing 
might not suggest to him. 

“ Well, Cynthy, my Imperial Sweetness, when I see Abig’il 
come down so beautiful, it reminded me of a little fice-t dog I 
had when I was a leetle codger. I called him Pick. His name 
was Picayune. Purty good name, wasn’t it ? ” 

“Yes, it was.” 

“ Well, now, that air little Pick wouldn’t never own up as 
he was driv outen the house. When he was whipped out, he 
wouldn’t never tuck his tail down, but curl it up over his back, 
and run acrost the yard and through the fence and down the 
road a-barkin’ fit to kill. Wanted to let on like as ef he’d run 
out of his own accord, with malice aforethought, you know. 
That's Abig’il.” 


288 


THE END OF THE WOELD. 


CHAPTER XL V. 

NEW PLANS. 

XCEPT Abigail Anderson and one other person, 
* everybody in the little world of Clark town- 
ship approved mightily the justice and disinterest- 
edness of Andrew. He had righted himself and 
Julia at a stroke, and people dearly love to have 
justice dealt out when it is not at their own expense. Samuel, 
who cherished in secret a great love for his daughter, was 
more than pleased that affairs had turned out in this way. But 
there was one beside Abigail who was not wholly satisfied. 
August spent half the night in protesting in vain against 
Andrew’s transfer of the river-farm to him. But Andrew said 
he had a right to give away his own if he chose. And there 
was no turning him. For if August refused a share in it, he 
would give it to Julia, and if she refused it, he would find 
somebody who would accept it. 

The next day after the settlement at Samuel Anderson’s, 
August came to claim his wife. Mrs. Abigail had now em- 
ployed a “help” in Cynthy Ann’s place, and Julia could be 
spared. August had refused all invitations to take up his 
temporary residence with Julia’s parents. The house had un- 


NEW PI4 INS. 


289 


pleasant associations in his mind, and he wanted to relieve 
Julia at once and forever from a despotism to which she 
could not offer any effectual resistance. Mrs. Anderson had 
eagerly loaded the wagon with feather-beds and other bridal 
property, and sent it over to the castle, that Julia might ap- 
pear to leave with her blessing. She kissed Julia tenderly, and 
hoped she’d have a happy life, and told her that if her hus- 
band should ever lose his property or treat her badly — such 
things may happen, you know — then she would always find 
a home with her mother. Julia thanked her for the offer of 
a refuge to which she never meant to flee under any circum- 
stances. And yet one never turns away from one’s home 
without regret, and Julia looked back with tears in her eyes at 
the chattering swifts whose nests were in the parlor chimney, 
and at the pee-wee chirping on the gate-post. The place had 
entered into her life. It looked lonesome now, but within a 
year afterward Norman suddenly married Betsey Malcolm. 
Betsey’s child had died soon after its birth, and Mrs. Anderson 
set herself to manage both Norman and his wife, who took up 
their abode with her. Nothing but a reign of terror could 
have made either of them of any account, but Mrs. Anderson 
furnished them this in any desirable quantity. They were 
never of much worth, even under her management, but she kept 
them in bounds, so that Norman ceased to get drunk more 
than five or six times a year, and Betsey flirted but little and 
at her peril. 

Once the old house was out of sight, there were no shad- 
ows on Julia’s face as she looked forward toward the new 
life. She walked in a still happiness by August as they went 
down through Shady Hollow. August had intended to show 


290 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

her a letter that he had from the mud-clerk, describing the 
bringing of Humphreys back to Paducah and his execution 
by a mob. But there was something so repelling in the gusto 
with which the story was told, and the story was so awful 
in itself, that he could not bear to interrupt the peaceful hap- 
piness of this hour by saying anything about it. 

August proposed to Julia that they should take a path 
through the meadow of the river-farm — their own farm now — 
and see the foundation of the little cottage Andrew had be- 
gun for them. And so in happiness they walked on through 
the meadow-path to the place on which their home was to 
stand. But, alas ! there was not a stick of timber left. Every 
particle of the material had been removed. It seemed that 
some great disappointment threatened them at the moment of 
their happiness. They hurried on in silent foreboding to the 
castle, but there the mystery was explained. 

“ I told you not to tempt me too far,” said Andrew. 
“ See ! I have concluded to build an addition to the castle and 
let you civilize me. We will live together and I will reform. 
This lonely life is not healthy, and now that I have children, 
why should I not let them live here with me ? ” 

Julia looked happy. I have no authentic information in 
regard to the exact words which she made use of to express 
her joy, but from what is known of girls of her age in gen- 
eral, it is safe to infer that she exclaimed, “ Oh ! I’m so glad ! ” 

While Andrew stood there smiling, with Julia near him, 
August having gone to the assistance of the carpenters in a 
matter demanding a little more ingenuity than they possessed, 
Jonas came up and drew the Philosopher aside. Julia could 
not hear what was said, but she saw Andrew’s brow contract. 


NEW PLANS. 


291 


“ I’ll shoot as sure as they come ! ” he said with passion. 
“ I won’t have my niece or August insulted in my house by 
a parcel of vagabonds.” 

“ O Uncle Andrew ! is it a shiveree ? ” asked Julia. 

“ Yes.” 

“ Well, don’t shoot. It’ll be so funny to have a shiveree.” 

“ But it is an insult to you and to August and to me. This 
is meant especially to be an expression of their feeling toward 
August as a German, though really their envy of his good for- 
tune has much to do with it. It is a second edition of the 
riot of last spring, in which Gottlieb came so near to being 
killed. Now, I mean to do my country service by leaving one 
or two less of them alive if they come here to-night.” For 
Andrew was full of that destructive energy so characteristic of 
the Western and Southern people. 

“Oh! no, don’t shoot. Can’t you think of some other 
way ? ” pleaded Julia. 

“ Well, yes, I could get the sheriff to come and bag a few 
of them.” 

“ And that will make trouble for many years. Let me see. 
Can’t we do this ? ” And Julia rapidly unfolded to Andrew 
and Jonas her plan of operations against the enemy. 

“ Number one ! ” said Jonas. “ They’ll fall into that air 
amby-scade as sure as shootin’. That plan is military and 
Christian and civilized and human and angelical and tancy- 
crumptious. It ort to meet the ’proval of the American Fish- 
hawk with all his pinions and talents. I’ll help to execute it, 
and beat the rascals or lay my bones a-bleachin’ on the desert 
sands of Shady Holler.” 

“Well,” said Andrew to Julia, “I knew, if I took you un- 


292 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 


der my roof, you’d make a Christian of me in spite of myself. 
And I am a sort of savage, that’s a fact.” 

Jonas hurried home and sent Cynthy over to the castle, and 
there was much work going on that afternoon. Andrew said 
that the castle was being made ready for its first siege. As 
night came on, Julia was in a perfect glee. Reddened by 
standing over the stove, with sleeves above her elbows and her 
black hair falling down upon her shoulders, she was such a 
picture that August stopped and stood in the door a minute to 
look at her as he came in to supper. 

“Why, Jule, how glorious you look!” he said. “I’ve a 
great mind to fall in love with you, mein Liebchen ! ” 

“ And I ham fallen in love with you, Caesar Augustus ! ” 
And well she might, for surely, as he stood in the door with 
his well-knit frame, his fine German forehead, his pure, refined 
mouth, and his clear, honest, amiable blue eyes, he was a man 
to fall in love with. 


THE SHIYEREE, 


293 


CHAPTER XLVI. 

THE SHIVEREE. 

Webster’s “American Dictionary of the Eng- 
lish Language” had not been made wholly in 
New England, it would not have lacked so many 
words that do duty as native-born or naturalized 
citizens in large sections of the United States, and 
among these words is the one that stands at the head of the 
present chapter. I know that some disdainful prig will assure 
me that it is but a corruption of the French “charivari” and 
so it is ; but then “ charivari ” is a corruption of the low Latin 
“ charivarium” and that is a corruption of something else, and, 
indeed, almost every word is a corruption of some other word. 
So that there is no good reason why “ shiveree,” which lives 
in entire unconsciousness of its French parentage and its Latin 
grand-parentage, should not find its place in an “American 
Dictionary.” 

But while I am writing a disquisition on the etymology of 
the word, the “ shiveree ” is mustering at Mand luff’s store. 
Bill Day has concluded that he is in no immediate danger of 
perdition, and that a man is a “blamed fool to git skeered 
about his soul.” Bob Short is sure the Almighty will not be 
too hard on a feller, and so thinks he will go on having “a 


294 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

little fun” now and then. And among the manly recreations 
which they have proposed to themselves is that of shivereeing 
“ that Dutchman, Gus Wehle.” It is the solemn opinion of 
the whole crowd that “no Dutchman hadn’t orter be so lucky 
as to git sech a beauty of a gal and a hundred acres of bot- 
tom lands to boot.” 

The members of the party were all disguised, some in one 
way and some in another, though most of them had their 
coats inside out. They thought it accessary to be disguised, 
“ bekase, you know, ” as Bill Day expressed it, “ ole Grizzly is 
apt to prosecute ef he gits evidence agin you.” And many 
were the conjectures as to whether he would shoot or not. 

The instruments provided by this orchestra were as various 
as their musical tastes. It is likely that even Mr. Jubilee Gil- 
more never saw such an outfit. Bob Short had a dumb-bull, 
a keg with a strip of raw-hide stretched across one end like 
a drum-head, while the other remained open. A waxed cord 
inserted in the middle of the drum-head, and reaching down 
through the keg, completed the instrument. The pulling of 
the hand over this cord made a hideous bellowing, hence 
its name. Bill Day had a gigantic watchman’s rattle, a 
hickory spring on a cog-wheel. It is called in the West a 
horse-fiddle, because it is so unlike either a horse or a fiddle. 
Then there were melodious tin pans and conch-shells and tin 
horns. But the most deadly noise was made by Jim West, who 
had two iron skillet-lids (“ leds ” he called them) which, when 
placed face to face, and nibbed, as you have seen children 
mb tumblers, made a sound discordant and deafening enough 
to have suggested Milton’s expression about the hinges which 
“grated harsh thunder.” 


THE SHIVEREE. 


295 


One of this party was a tallish man, so dressed as to look 
like a hunchback, and a hunchback so tall was a most singu- 
lar figure. He had joined them in the dark, and the rest 
were unable to guess who it could be, and he, for his part, 
would not tell. They thumped him and pushed him, but at 
each attack he only leaped from the ground like a circus 
clown, and made his tin horn utter so doleful a complaint as 
set the party in an uproar of laughter. They could not be 
sure who he was, but he was a funny fellow to have along 
with them at any rate. 

He was not only funny, but he was evidently fearless. For 
when they came to the castle it was all dark and still. Bill 
Day said that it looked “ powerful juberous to him. Ole Andy 
meant to use shootin’-ir’ns, and didn’t want to be pestered with 
no lights blazin’ in his eyes.” But the tall hunchback cleared 
the fence at a bound, and told them to come on “ ef they had 
the sperrit of a two-weeks-old goslin into ’em.” So the bottle 
was passed round, and for very shame they followed their un- 
gainly leader. 

“ Looky here, boys,” said the hunchback, “ they’s one way 
that we can fix it so’s ole Grizzly can’t shoot. They’s a little 
shop-place, a sort of a shed, agin the house, on the side next 
to the branch. Let’s git in thar afore we begin, and he can’t 
shoot.” 

The orchestra were a little stupefied with drink, and they 
took the idea quickly, never stopping to ask how they could 
retreat if Andrew chose to shoot. Jim West thought things 
looked scaly, but he warn’t agoin’ to backslide arter he’d got 
so fur. 

When they got into Andrew’s shop, where he had a new 


296 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


and beautiful skiff in building, the tall hunchback shut the door, 
and the rest did not notice that he put the key in his pocket. 

That serenade! Such a medley of discordant sounds, such 
a clatter and clangor, such a rattle of horse-fiddle, such a bel- 
lowing of dumb-bull, such a snorting of tin horns, such a ring- 
ing of tin pans, such a grinding of skillet-lids ! But the house 
remained quiet. Once Bill Day thought that he heard a laugh 
within. Julia may have lost her self-control. She was so 
happy, and a little unrestrained fun was so strange a luxury J 

At last the door between the house and shop was suddenly 
opened, and Julia, radiant as she could be, stood on the thresh- 
old with a candle in her hand. 

“ Come in, gentlemen.” 

But the gentlemen essayed to go out. 

“Locked in, by thunder!” said Jim West, trying the out- 
side door of the shop. 

“We heard you were coming, gentlemen, and provided a 
little entertainment. Come in !” 

“ Come in, boys,” said the hunchback. “ don’t be afeard of 
nobody.” 

Mechanically they followed the hunchback into the room, 
for there was nothing else to be done. A smell of hot coffee 
and the sight of a well-spread table greeted their senses. 

“Welcome, my friends, thrice welcome!” said Andrew. 
“Put down your instruments and have some supper.” 

“Let me relieve you,” said Julia, and she took the dumb- 
bull from Bob Short and the “ horse-fiddle ” from Day, the tin 
horns and tin pans from others, and the two skillet-lids from 
Jim West, who looked as sheepish as possible. August es- 
corted each of them to the table, though his face did not look 


THE SHIYEREE. 


297 


altogether cordial. Some old resentment for the treatment of 
his father interfered with the heartiness of his hospitality. The 
hunchback in this light proved to be Jonas, of course; and 
Bill Day whispered to the one next to him that they had 
been “ tuck in and done fer that time.” 

“ Gentlemen,” said Andrew, “ we are much obliged for your 
music.” And Cynthy would certainly have laughed out if she 
had not been so perplexed in her mind to know whether An- 
drew was speaking the truth. 

Such a motley set of wedding guests as they were, with 
their coats inside out and their other disguises ! Such a race 
of pied pipers ! And looking at their hangdog faces you would 
have said, “Such a lot of sheep- thieves! ” Though why a 
sheep-thief is considered to be a more guilty-looking man than 
any other criminal, I do not know. Jonas looked bright 
enough and ridiculous enough with his hunch. They all ate 
rather heartily, for how could they resist the attentions of 
Cynthy Ann and the persuasions of Julia, who poured them 
coffee and handed them biscuit, and waited upon them as 
though they were royal guests ! And, moreover, the act of 
eating served to cover their confusion. 

As the meal drew to a close, Bill Day felt that he, being in 
some sense the leader of the party, ought to speak. He was 
not quite sober, though he could stand without much staggering, 
lie had been trying for some time to frame a little speech, but 
his faculties did not work smoothly. 

“ Mr. President — I mean Mr. Anderson — permit me to offer 
you our pardon. I mean to beg your apologies — to — ahem — 
hope that our — that your — our — thousand — thanks — your — you 
know what I mean.” And he sat down in foolish confusion. 


208 


THE END OP THE WORLD. 


“Oh! yes. All right; much obliged, my friend/' said the 
Philosopher, who had not felt so much boyish animal life in 
twenty -five years. 

And Jim West whispered to Bill: “You expressed my 
sentiments exactly.” 

“Mr. Anderson,” said Jonas, rising, and thus lifting up his 
hunched shoulders and looking the picture of a long-legged 
heron standing in the water, “Mr. Anderson, you and our 
young and happy friend, Mr. Wehle, will accept our thanks. 
We thought that music was all you wanted to gin a delight- 
ful — kinder — sorter — well, top-dressin’, to this interestin’ occa- 
sion. Now they’s nothin’ sweeter’ n a tin horn, ’thout ’tis a 
melodious conch-shell utterin’ its voice like a turkle-dove. 
Then we’ve got the paytent double whirlymagig hoss-violeen, 
and the tin pannyforte, and, better nor all, the grindin’ skellet- 
led cymbals. We’ve laid ourselves out and done our purtiest — 
hain’t we, feller-musicians ? — to prove that we was the best 
band* on the Ohio River. An’ all out of affection and respect 
for this ere happy pair. And we’re all happy to be here. 
Hain’t we ? ” (Here they all nodded assent, though they 
looked as though they wished themselves far enough.) “ Our 
enstruments is a ieetie out of toon, pwin’ to the dampness of 
the night air, and so I trust you’ll excuse us playin’ a fare- 
well piece.” 

Jim West was so anxious to get away that he took ad- 
vantage of this turn to say good-evening, and though the mis- 
chievous Julia insisted that he should select his instrument, he 
had not the face to confess to the skillet-lids, and got out of 
it by assuring her that he hadn’t brought nothing, “ only come 
along to see the fun.” And each member of the party re- 


THE SHlVEREE. 


299 


peated the transparent lie, so that Julia found herself supplied 
with more musical instruments than any young housekeeper 
need want, and Andrew hung them, horns, pans, conch-shell, 
dumb-bull, horse-fiddle, skillet-lids, and all, in his library, as 
trophies captured from the enemy. 

Much as I should like to tell you of the later events of 
the Philosopher’s life, and about Julia and August, and their 
oldest son, whose name is Andrew, and all that, I do not know 
that I can do better than to bow myself out with the abashed 
serenaders, letting this musical epilogue harmoniously close 
the book ; writing just here, 

THE END. 



Edward Eggleston’s Standard Works. 


THE END OF THE WORLD. 

A LOVE STORY. 

In Love with a Dutchman. — An Explosion. — A Farewell. — A Counter- 
Irritant.— At the Castle.— The Backwoods Philosopher.— Within and 
Without.— Figgers won’t Lie.— The New Singing-Master.— An Offer of 
Help.— The Coon-dog Argument.— Two Mistakes.— The Spider Spins. 
'—The Spider’s Web. — The Web Broken. — Jonas Expounds the Subject 
—The Wrong Pew. — The Encounter. —The Mother. — The Steam- 
Doctor.— The Hawk in a New Part.— Jonas Expresses His Opinion on 
Dutchmen. — Somethin’ Ludikerous. — The Giant Great-heart.— A Chap- 
ter of Betweens.— A Nice Little Game.— The Result of an Evening with 
Gentlemen.— Waking up an Ugly Customer.— August and Norman. — 
Aground. — Cynthy Ann’s Sacrifice. — Julia’s Enterprise. — The Secret 
Stairway. — The Interview.— Getting Ready for the End. — The Sin of 
Sanctimony. — The Deluge. — Scaring a Hawk.— Jonas takes an Appeal. 
— Selling out. — The Last Day and What Happened in it. — For Ever and 
Ever. — The Midnight Alarm. — Squaring Accounts. — New Plans. — The 
Shiveree. Price , Post-paid, $ 1.50 . 

— .«■ «— 

THE HOOSIER SCHOOL-MASTER. 

A Private Lesser from a Bull-dog.— A Spell Coming. — Mirandy, Hank, 
and Shocky. — Spelling down the Master. — The Walk Home. — A Night 
at Pete Jones’s. — Ominous Remarks of Mr. Jones.— The Struggle in 
the Dark. — Has God Forgotten Shocky ? — The Devil of Silence. — Miss 
Martha Hawkins. — The Hardshell Preacher. — A Struggle for the 
Mastery. — A Crisis with Bud. — The Church of the Best Licks. — The 
Church Militant. — A Council of War. — Odds and Ends.— Face to Face. 
— God Remembers Shocky. — Miss Nancy Sawyer. — Pancakes. — A 
Charitable Institution. — The Good Samaritan. — Bud Wooiug. — A Letter 
and its Consequences. — A Loss and a Gain. — The Flight. — The Trial. — 
“Brother Sodom.” — The Trial Concluded. — After the Battle. — Into 
the Light. — “ How it Came Out.” Price, Post-paid, $1.25. 

Library Edition. Price , Post-paid , $1.50. 


The Mystery of Metropolisville. 

Words Beforehand. — The Autocrat of the Stage-Coach.— The Sod 
Tavern. — Land and Love. — Albert and Katy.— Corner Lots. — Little 
Katy's Lover. — Catching and Getting Caught. — Ieabel Marlay. — Lovers 
and Lovers. — Plausaby, Esq., Takes a Fatherly Interest. — About Several 
Things. — An Adventure. — A Shelter.— The Inhabitant. — An Episode. — 
The Return. — Sawney and His Old Love. — A Collision.— Standing 
Guard in Vain. — Sawney and Westcott. — Rowing.— Sailing.— Sinking. 
— Dragging. — Afterwards. — The Mystery.— The Arrest. — The Tempter. 
The Trial.— The Penitentiary .—Mr. Lurton.— A Confession.— Death. — 
Mr. Lurton’s Courtship. — Unbarred. — Isabel. — The Last. — Words 
Afterwards. Price, Post-paid, $ 1.50 • 

ORANGE JUDD COMPANY, Publishers, 

52 Sc 54 Lafayette Place, New York- 


STANDARD BOOKS 

PUBLISHED BY 

ORANGE JUDD COMPANY 

NEW YORK CHICAGO 

439-44I Lafayette Street Marquette Building 


JDOOKS sent to all parts of the world for catalog 
price . Discounts for large quantities on appli- 
cation. Correspondence invited. Brief descriptive 
catalog free . Large illustrated catalog, six cents. 


Soils 

By Charles William Burkett, Director Kansas Agri- 
cultural Experiment Station. The most complete and popular 
work of the kind ever published. As a rule, a book of this 
sort is dry and uninteresting, but in this case it reads like a 
novel. The author has put into it his individuality. The story 
of the properties of the soils, their improvement and manage- 
ment, as well as a discussion of the problems of crop growing 
and crop feeding, make this book equally valuable to the 
farmer, student and teacher. 

There are many illustrations of a practical character, each 
one suggesting some fundamental principle in soil manage- 
ment. 303 pages. $A x 8 inches. Cloth $1.25 


Insects Injurious to Vegetables 

By Dr. F. H. Chittenden, of the United States Depart- 
ment of Agriculture. A complete, practical work giving 
descriptions of the more important insects attacking vegetables 
of all kinds with simple and inexpensive remedies to check and 
destroy them, together with timely suggestions to prevent their 
recurrence. A ready reference book for truckers, market- 
gardeners, farmers as well as others who grow vegetables in a 
small way for home use; a valuable guide for college and ex- 
periment station workers, school-teachers and others interested 
in entomology of nature study. Profusely illustrated. 5J4 x 8 
inches. 300 pages. Cloth $1.50 


The Cereals in America 

By Thomas F. Hunt, M.S., D.Agri., Professor of Agron- 
omy, Cornell University. If you raise five acres of any kind 
of grain you cannot afford to be without this book. It is in 
every way the best book on the subject that has ever been 
written. It treats of the cultivation and improvement of every 
grain crop raised in America in a thoroughly practical and 
accurate manner. The subject-matter includes a comprehensive 
and succinct treatise of wheat, maize, oats, barley, rye, rice, 
sorghum, (kafir corn) and buckwheat, as related particularly 
to American conditions. First-hand knowledge has been the 
policy of the author in his work, and every crop treated is 
presented in the light of individual study of the plant. If you 
have this book you have the latest and best that has been 
written upon the subject. Illustrated. 450 pages. $ l /2 x 8 
inches. Cloth $1.75 

The Forage and Fiber Crops in America 

By Thomas F. Hunt. This book is exactly what its title 
indicates. It is indispensable to the farmer, student and teacher 
who wishes all the latest and most important information on 
the subject of forage and fiber crops. Like its famous com- 
panion. “The Cereals in America,” by the same author, it 
treats of the cultivation and improvement of every one of the 
forage and fiber crops. With this book in hand, you have 
the latest and most up-to-date information available. Illus- 
trated. 428 pages. 5H x 8 inches. Cloth $1.75 

The Book of Alfalfa 

History. Cultivation and Merits, Its Uses as a Forage 
and Fertilizer. The appearance of the Hon..F. D. Coburn’s 
little book on Alfalfa a few years ago has been a profit revela- 
tion to thousands of farmers throughout the country, and the 
increasing demand for still more information on the subject 
has induced the author to prepare the present volume, which 
is by far the most authoritative, complete and valuable work 
on this forage crop published anywhere. It is printed on fine 
paper and illustrated with many full-page photographs that 
were taken with the especial view of their relation to the text. 
336 pages. 6 l / 2 x 9 inches. Bound in cloth, .with gold stamp- 
ing. It is unquestionably the handsomest agricultural reference 
book that has ever been issued. Price, postpaid . . . $2.00 

Clean Milk 

By S. D. Belcher, M.D. In this book the author sets forth 
practical methods for the exclusion of bacteria from milk, 
and how to prevent contamination of milk from the stable to 
the consumer. Illustrated. 5x7 inches. 146 pages. 
Cloth. .... . . . $1.00 


Bean Culture 


By Glenn C Sev«=:y, B.S. A practical treatise on the pro- 
duction and marketing of beans. It includes the manner of 
growth, soils and fertilizers adapted, best varieties, seed selec- 
tion and breeding, planting, harvesting, insects and fungous 
pests, composition and feeding value; with a special chapter 
on markets by Albert W. Fulton. A practical book for the 
grower and student alike. Illustrated. 144 pages. 5x7 
inches. Cloth $0.50 

Celery Culture 

By W. R. Beattie. A practical guide for beginners and a 
standard reference of great interest to persons already engaged 
in celery growing. It contains many illustrations giving a clear 
conception of the practical side of celery culture. The work 
is complete in every detail, from sowing a few seeds in a 
window-box in the house for early plants, to the handling 
and marketing of celery in carload lots. Fully illustrated. 
150 pages. 5x7 inches. Cloth $0.50 


Tomato Culture 

By Will W. Tracy. The author has rounded up in this 
book the most complete account of tomato culture in all its 
phases that has ever been gotten together. It is no second- 
hand work of reference, but a complete story of the practical 
experiences of the best posted expert on tomatoes in the world. 
No gardener or farmer can afford to be without the book. 
Whether grown for home use or commercial purposes, the 
reader has here suggestions and information nowhere else 
available. Illustrated. 150 pages. 5x7 inches. Cloth. $0.50 

The Potato 

By Samuel Fraser. This book is destined to rank as a 
standard work upon Potato Culture. While the practical side 
has been emphasized, the scientific part has not been neglected, 
and the information given is of value, both to the grower and 
the student. Taken all in all, it is the most complete, reliable 
and authoritative book on the potato ever published in America. 
Illustrated. 200 pages. 5x7 inches. Cloth $0.75 

Dwarf Fruit Trees 

By F. A. Waugh. This interesting book describes in detail 
the several varieties of dwarf fruit trees, their propagation, 
planting, pruning, care and general management. Where there 
is a limited amount of ground to be devoted to orchard pur- 
poses, and where quick results are desired, this book will meet 
with a warm welcome. Illustrated. 112 pages. 5x7 inches. 
Cloth t a $0.50 



















Deacidified using the Bookkeeper prc 
Neutralizing Agent: Magnesium Oxid< 
Treatment Date: 



PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGIES 
1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Twp., PA 16066 






